James, for what it's worth -- and I'm not saying that this is necessarily the case here-- but if a carrier believes that it will scale large enough, and they plan on a multi-year deployment, they may very well select two different vendors (if they could be normalized to a standard set of functions) and play one against the other in a leveraged way, and go with both for the same type of point solution, throughout their fabric.
The Inter-exchange and LEC carriers have done this extensively with their DCS elements, as they have historically with their Class 5s and other forms of big ticket items.
As the optical layer becomes standardized to within a certain list of expectations, we may see the same things begin to occur in the DWDM and other optical element areas, but before widespread standardization is the reason for this, there's another set of circumstances at play.
One aspect of this has to do with being compatible with others with whom a carrier needs to "hand off", either in the long haul or at the terminus point. In many instances --most instances, in fact-- a carrier will share borders with other carriers who possess dissimilar platforms. What takes place from there are individual business decisions relating to peering relationships in the ISP sense, and co-carriering and meet-point criteria, in the traditional telco sense.
I think you see what I'm saying. It needn't be one or the other, exclusively. In fact, at some point it "can't" be one or the other in such a pluralistic setting as pervasive internetworking, unless all of the standards as I began stating earlier, above, are so rigidly set and interoperability criteria are so stringently met, by all. Don't hold your breath on this one, though. And like I said: For what it's worth.
Regards, Frank Coluccio |
