re: "some illiterate nit..." Ya gotta love it. Fortunately, I know of only a couple of such nits on SI. Getting to your questions, yes... network status and control rooms (aka, NOCs) ala rail-switching centers, are always impressive sights.
Most of their utility is designed to enhance such googliness through ostentation, when you consider that the average network control dude sits at a unix-based Sun workstation in some obscure corner of the office somewhere, or at home when they are telecommuting, and never looks up to even see if the lights are blinking.
I can recall going to an open house in 1965, prior to going to work for T, and walking through their status center in NY. Even back then they were using glitzy wall-sized boards, filled with a dozen different colored and blinking lights of the genre that one normally associates with Times Square on New Years Eve, which showed the restorations of failed and congested routes around the country on a real-time basis. I, too, was very impressed at that early time. Of course, real time was relative then, as it is now.
Back then, most route creations and restorals were done in a manual mode, if even only to await the command from someone in charge who gave the word to execute the "patch" or to do a switchover to a standby route. Today, most of these features are achieved under SONET self-healing and stored program restoration routines, and on the Internet, through IP alternate route discovery algorithms.
I posted several articles on the new FCTF board the other day that had to do with the TSIX and SCMR transactions:
Message 14921801
Message 14921824
Message 14925672
These cos are getting a lot of mileage now from all of this business surrounding instant route creation in a mesh environment. You'll notice, however, that TSIX's network topology is comprised of closed rings. Just in case, I suppose. See their North American network Map.
360.net
And on their transoceanics they boast the ability to do self healing on BLSRs [bi-directional, line-switched (SONET) rings].
360.net
360.net
"... the ability to almost instantly reconfigure the paths so that traffic is redistributed... This ability apparently results from the use of Sycamore technology in a mesh topology."
The majority of TSIX' largest users, as a percentage of leased capacity, are IXCs, Internet backbone providers, telcos and other service providers whose remaining networks are still primarily SONET in nature. Net-net, it'll be a while before many of them convert to an all-mesh topology. But according to SCMR this doesn't stop them, because they ostensibly can also do SONET with equal ease.
And the interim period, between now and the time the world tips over to a mostly mesh topology, will continue to remain sufficiently ring-rich by the *traditional_carrier_customers,* to keep the SONET folks in business for a long while. There's all of that recently purchased gear to protect, and a large universe of users who are still demanding it.
So, where does that leave us with regard to your question? I'm not sure. What I do know is that some vendors are poised to make maximum hay out of a proposed environment that has yet to become mainstay.
I didn't catch ffth's lard-ass statement. Can you point me to it?
FAC |
