Ray, please note that I am replying to posts which are days old. I didn't get to the Enkido thing yet, but since you stepped to the front of the line, thanks. By the way, the url you posted got clipped in your original message. For a better shot at it, it's at:
zdnet.com
The article, however, does not support the other claim that you passed along to me concerning their possessing over 3,000 fiber miles of capacity in NY City, unless, of course, they mean rentable fibers, which by the tone of his argument, is what he actually means.
While the philosophical direction that this individual is promoting has its merits, I must say that he took some considerable measure of license in describing the relative attributes, costs and merits in his comparisons. A fiber optic laser based transmitter does not an OC-48 optical line card make. There's quite a bit more to the latter [including years of amortized development costs and interoperability testing and cross-industry compliance issues, failover features for self healing, overhead software considerations for network management and traffic management purposes, etc.], than being able to launch a baseband digital signal at 2.5 Gb/s. This part of his argument is so drastically afield from reality that I am almost embarrassed for him to acknowledge it. So much for the similarities between SONET optical line cards and other forms of optical baseband transmission elements.
But he does make an excellent point about there being more economical ways [far more economical, at that] to administer and provide services than those which the legacy carriers and their providers would have us do. And for this I give him kudos for highlighting.
Concerning the supply of fiber in the ground, however, again I would seriously debate this issue, specifically about there being ample fiber in the ground at this time. To where? To service provider central office locations? Maybe, in some... maybe in many, situations. Or does he mean to end users' locations, where users can actually attach and make use of it? The latter is hardly the case, no where near it, in fact.
Getting back to SoftCom, this is an company that I would like to look more closely at, and reply about at a later time. Thanks for bringing it to the attention of the board.
Regars, Frank Coluccio |
