Hello campradun, and welcome. Yes, I read LR.. not religiously, but on and off as time permits. Re: top tenning, I'm usually a bit dubious of such lists.
What is the intent behind them, and what are the criteria for inclusion? A top ten list that is based on pure science can look quite different from one that is tailored to companies (and their products) that service providers can actually use during the near to intermediate term.
IMO, when a publication compiles such a list - here, I'm not singling out LR or any other, specifically - they are usually influenced by what they are most familiar with, sometimes by what their readers want to read (legacy bashing, for example), instead of taking the time to explore operational issues and collateral, or secondary, implications** which sometimes can be more significant than the primary attribute or "point solution" under consideration. IOW, they don't explore the more global architectural issues that might be affected.
Worse, sometimes a list can be skewed by more dubious factors. My preference is to stay abreast of - and study, if necessary - evolving techs in the optical sector. We'll be talking about optical burst here soon, for example. All the while assessing which ones are suitable for point solutions during the near term, and where the trajectory is headed.
I don't mean to appear intentionally evasive on this topic, but that's where I'm at with regards to top tenning.
** I came across one such collateral implication, as referenced above, the other day in an article extolling the virtues of one vendor's superior electrical power efficiency versus that of another's. A very timely piece of exploitation, vis a vis the current California energy crisis, which was actually referenced in the article. As it turned out, the vendor who supported reduced power consumption could not do grooming at capacity levels where most SPs usually exchange their currency, at the SONET OCn levles. The one who did grooming, however, used more power.
What was not stated was that the unit that used less power was only doing a mere fraction of the job of the unit that consumed more power in certain, albeit, many, applications. OTOH, very deep into the core, where only lambdas are switched, the less consuming unit is truly more effective, but such "purely" lambda-driven nodes that do not exchange OC12s and OC48s are still rare, if existent at all. Instead, the more efficient unit usually offloads its traffic to adjacent network elements in the same central office/pop facility to do their dirty work for them, unless the traffic is at the granularity that can be supported by the higher order lambda.
The more efficient unit, in other words, had to off-load a lot of cross-connect and grooming activity at the sub-lambda level to a roomful of add-drop multiplexers and digital cross connects (and in one instance that I am personally aware of, to the unit that it was being compared to!), while the unit that consumed more power accomplished all of those functions on its own backplane, and within its own swtiching fabric. And it does this at a mere fraction of the total power required by all of the external devices that are necessary when using its "more efficient" counterpart.
Such trade offs are representative of the collateral implications I referenced above, and they can only be assessed fully when viewing the broader architectures that these devices plug into.
While I'm on this topic, grooming became a hot topic at about the same time that this power issue was publicized. And the company that is viewed as the more efficient one, powerwise, is now fast at work, along with others, to be able to provide such grooming, too. I'd say that they got their marketecture licks in just in time.
FAC |
