Mike,
"And a SONET MAN is just a natural extension of their ATM backbone?"
Probably just the reverse. Which is to say that ATM might be considered a natural outgrowth if the MAN were based on SONET. Especially in the telco carrier and ISP sectors. It's really quite arbitrary, though. ATM was designed to fit SONET/SDH like a glove, in other words. The point I'm making here, though, is that SONET was implemented and accepted first.
I think that it's a safe bet that Williams will be targeting the SPs/xLECs as their largest takers of bandwidth in the metro to be hauled off onto their long haul, and almost all of the xLECs -and a surprising high number of the ISPs and backbone providers- will be using ATM over SONET, as well.
I'm reminded at this point that Williams' new initiative with Intel is one which will use ATM. And we'll see a lot more ATM until the ISPs and the IETF are able to finalize the specifications, and reconcile just how they will "implement," a universal scheme of cross-provider (inter-cloud) Diff-serv and other QoS mechanisms. I've been reminded recently by some excellent writings by both proponents and antogonists of Didd-serv and IP QoS, alike, that there is a ton of work to be done, and years of hammering out intervendor implementation, before we see a universally accepted set of QoS mechanisms for IP. In the meantime, growing amounts of bandwidth in the core might appear to be mitigating the effects of this, for the time being. On the larger b-b's, in any event.
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BTW, Williams has, for a very long time (I'd estimate approximately 13 years), maintained a legacy network of sorts, in a limited amount of capacity in their WAN, even after they sold off the majority of their original fiber network to Worldcom. Over a bare minimum of one or two strands which they were permitted to keep as a condition in their Worldcom deal, they supported an extensive national network, which was designed to support the commercial Program TV industry (NBC, ABC, CBS, CPB, FOX, etc). They specialized in delivering network TV services as compressed payloads over DS3s as an alternative to satellite and more archaic forms of microwave transmission. To this extent, they maintained a legacy network, I suppose you could say. But this, too, is an arbitrary call, depending on whose perspective you maintain. If you worked for Williams throughout that period (I believe the subsidiary was Vyvvx), then you would have considered it a legacy network.
FAC |
