Agreed, obviously the economics are paramount. I just posted another message on RB board that speaks to some not-so-obvious economics, but in this case I was referring to the implementation of dark fiber networks. Studying the economics of networking, like so many other economic analyses, is a study in balloon dynamics, where if you push here it pops there. An excerpt from my RB message follows:
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"Elsewhere you noted:
""As I understand it, companies configure fiber system purchases based on not only cost, but power budgets, bandwidth necessities, and the applications for which it is needed, guaranteed service, quality of service, bit error rate acceptability,etc.. ""
Recently I've come to learn of another intimidating and inhibiting factor that may stunt optical deployments, especially where Dark is available, a la MFNX-provided facilities. And that is, users find themselves as presenting the biggest bottleneck, whereas prior to obtaining dark it was the last mile and WAN that held them up.
With gigabit piping (soon to be 10 gigabit) in the Metro network now costing as much (or as little, depending on your perspective) as a T1 at 1.544 Mb/s did, less than a decade ago, enterprises are finding that they must now re-tool in order to scale to the greater potentials presented by the new lambda plumbing.
When they look back into their own enterprise intranets, they suddenly realize that they don't have the processing power in their switches and routers that would be conducive to the far greater bit rates that are now dirt cheap between buildings and campuses. This is doubly appalling to many firms who have just recently re-done their intranets, at great expense and implementation grief, anew.
Most often it's not even a matter of simply sliding in a few more Meg of caching and higher-speed "line" cards. Instead, they find that they must move up to the next graduation of edge and distribution gear frames, entirely. Moving, say, from an adequately sized CSCO router to a more powerful one. Or, they may find that their Gigabit Ethernet switches and supporting cabling infrastructures don't have the extensibility that they need to scale.
Just a few thoughts on the ever-shifting network bottleneck. Dark fiber may be cheap in the street, but it could wreak havoc on budgets (even if only momentarily in the larger scheme of things), where the larger enterprise backbone and distribution networks are concerned.
The saving grace, and perhaps a greater factor behind putting it in, is dark fiber's increased efficiency, especially through its neutralizing effects on distance, that drives up productivity while engendering new forms of services that were previously too expensive to even contemplate. |
