Life After Routers
This is not a good time to be in the core router business.
Service providers have had it. Conventional routers today at the core of their networks just can't solve the problems that keep them up at night. They don't need bigger and faster. They need better. Much better.
First, there's the issue of scale. Traditional core routers/switches no longer scale with Internet traffic growth. For 30 years, port speed and switch speed only had to grow at Moore's Law. In 1997, when traffic on the Internet started doubling every six months, the core of the network began to require switch speed at a rate greater than Moore's Law. Since then, no one has built a router that can keep up for more than a year or two. Unfortunately carriers can't afford to continue replacing equipment every 12 to 18 months. "Forklifting" out core routers to meet network growth is expensive, and even worse, can lead to service interruption.
Then there's the fact routers just don't recover from problems very elegantly. Today's core routers take 30 seconds to several minutes to re-converge network traffic when an outage occurs. That's minutes of network downtime, lost data and unhappy customers. While SONET can cut over in 50 milliseconds, carriers have to waste 50% of their bandwidth to do so. Which is tragic, as data carriers typically need all bandwidth in their network to reduce delay and maximize economics. There's service interruption and/or poor network utilization in either scenario.
Traditional routers can't balance network loads to accommodate fast-moving traffic shifts. When traffic increases between two nodes, routers overload that path because they don't know any better. If there's no human intervention, the network experiences outages, delays, and service interruptions. To avoid these situations, carriers have hired hundreds of people to engineer traffic on their networks. Now, with network traffic quadrupling every year, what carrier can afford to quadruple its network engineer headcount every year? Expensive.
Finally, core routers are not available 24x7x365. Vendors say their equipment has carrier-grade availability, but carriers tell the real truth. Data equipment today is notoriously unreliable. Carriers need their equipment to stay in service because THEIR customers have higher expectations today than ever. No service provider should give its customers a reason to move to a competing carrier with a service interruption. Carriers need 9s. Lots of 9s. They need hitless hardware and software upgrades as in the voice world.
Carriers say today's core router manufacturers obsolete themselves with every new product they introduce. Given these limitations, carriers would love to sound the death knell for routers at the heart of their networks.
Are we ever glad we're not in the router business.
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