These technologies support wire-speed switching, unlike
FDDI, he said. When the MAEs and NAPs were first
constructed, FDDI was a good, solid choice, Weingarten said.
But not today. FDDI can only switch at 100M bit/sec. If you are
connecting to a MAE with an OC-3 or OC-12 connection, you
will not get 155M bit/sec or 622M bit/sec respectively, he said.
Although the second installment of the $10 million will fund
research to determine which of these technologies is viable,
principal MAE architect Steve Feldman said WorldCom is not
ready to commit to a single architecture but is considering all the
options.
ISPs that are dependent on the MAEs are not happy with
WorldCom's choices thus far. "There has to be more thought put
into the scaling of the interconnects," said Rodney Joffe, chief
technical officer for Phoenix-based ISP Genuity, Inc.
Joffe contends that WorldCom is already too late to solve the
problem. "They should already be up and running with a test
bed."
"The MAEs suck," said Motley Fool's Gibbs. He has been
dealing with the MAE problems for many months now and is
excited when UUNET Technologies, Inc., his ISP, enters into
private peering with his customers' ISPs.
In fact, private peering is quite popular among the top-tier ISPs.
Private peering arrangements are typically two dedicated T-3
connections between two ISPs. Each ISP takes responsibility
for one of the T-3 lines. Here, ISPs can exchange traffic without
going through any of the public exchange points.
However, all maintain public peering connections to MAEs and
NAPs around the country. |
