Gary, Thread, please excuse the late reply and thanks for the offer to join in in discussion on the other forum. In the past I have attempted on various occasions to get a discussion going there on the merits of technical progress being made - not only by this company, but the broader sector, in general. I usually get reminded that that thread has to do with this company, and not technology, which is okay by me. There's plenty of room on the 'net for all persuasions. I mean this, genuinely.
As for my thoughts concerning the increase in bandwidth, the release is too vague for me to be able to discern any significance. If you'd like a broader answer to what this means, and how and why incremental bandwidth is implemented, I covered this the other day in the second part of the FC Tech Thread, at:
Message 11432553
The snip follows:
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re:<<About 70 percent of the SONET rings operate at
OC12-or-less line rates. >>
Does that seem accurate to you?
Yes, thus far, I would think, but I don't have any accurate statistics
on this. Some reasons for this may not be obvious, and there may be
an offsetting argument to his observation.
One must consider that the next step up from an OC12 is OC48, a
non-trivial step up for some carriers who have legacy 12's in place.
Also, there is what I call a Times Four pattern at play here: OC3,
OC12, OC48, OC192, and now an emerging OC768. Times Four. This
doesn't quite fit the "powers of ten" definition, but the same
principles of gain are at work.
The offset? When some systems are brought up as OC12, they are
actually early add ons to infrastructure occupying the shelf space,
and a single STM module (OC12), in an OC48 system. Again, these
may be during periods of early growth. Through modular expansion,
these 12's can be incremented, at will, to the next b-w requirement
through the addition of optical line card modules.
Also, multiple [up to four] OC12s can be derived from the same
OC48 add drop mux, or ADM, which makes his observations kind of
moot in this respect, when you think about it. How many different
ways do you want to slice an apple?
<<Bandwidth scalability and the ability to overlay existing
SONET rings can be accomplished through the use of DWDM >>
Does this provide the fine level of granularity the author speaks
of?..
I think that this is a relative assessment, hence a subjective one. For
a carrier, yes, these increments in b-w might be considered "fine"
ones, but for an enterprise who must pay the freight across vast
distances, they might be seen as monumentally coarse.
"It seems in one sense the author is saying the SONET ring
topology is just "getting in the way and should be dropped rather
than band-aided into oblivion," and in another sense the author
says next generation carriers need to consider compatibility as a
foremost concern:"
<<This must also work in rings for the purpose of overlaying
existing SONET fiber topology and for service providers that are
more acclimated to ring operation>>
"I'm not real sure what he's trying to say..."
Hard to tell, but I would bet that a great part of this probably has to
do with what he perceives (and is probably correct in) as work
habits, legacy thinking, all the things that are on the side of new
startups who do not carry the baggage on their backs that the
incumbents do. Also, the embedded infrastructures, both
administrative and operational, which established carriers have in
place need to be leveraged and fully used in order to maximize
investment potentials (so conventional wisdom dictates, in any
event), which newer frameworks of fiber-based networking are not
fully conducive to.
Next stop, self healing and failover schemes. Later.
Regards, Frank Coluccio
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