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Technology Stocks : Frank Coluccio Technology Forum - ASAP -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Kenneth E. De Paul who wrote (665)	12/7/1999 10:59:00 PM
From: Frank A. Coluccio	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1782

re: integrated management and control of optical and upper layers Ken, I hesitated from replying too quickly to your upstream request for an opinion on this subject because I didn't want to seem entirely theoretical with my response. The following exchange between two Internet Service Providers may shed some light on the need to integrate the management of the optical layers with those of traffic management and, as we have been discussing in the uplinked posts. It boils down to the enabling of self-provisioning by network elements through the use of intelligent sensing and routing systems, and the ability to do on-the-fly service creation, in the future. Note that not all of these attributes are spelled out entirely below, but the following exchange is at least minimally instructive, and points to where I'm at on this particular issue. My emphasis is on the second posters reply in bold: ====== A message posted by an ISP staffer on a thread titled: "multi-homing:" > For large capacity sites, colo is the only way, with potential self-homing > within two years. It just can't happen faster than that. Also, smaller > providers are out, because of public peering point congestion and that is > usually their only avenue. As someone else pointed out, us smaller providers often have multiple connections to tier-1's. In the past, it was likely that your friendly local ISP had only two tier-1 pipes and your regional had a big pipe into one of the NAPs. But given the overwhelming market consolidation of the tier-1's these days, independent regionals are more likely to have done what we've done: just go out and pay UUNET, GTE, et al whatever their toll is so we can guarantee high availability. Even at those high prices, we can still provide better service than any one of those companies can on its own within our market (i.e. it's no big deal to UUNET if their Boston PoP goes down for a few minutes, but it would be if _our_ Boston PoP went down). What I'm also finding these days is that, with the exception of UUNET, wholesale pricing is favorable to us. This business model has, in fact, recently sold well on Wall Street. A company called InterNAP just went public, and that's what they're doing. > Large providers, with their own private > dark-fiber network, leaving only last-mile traffic to the public Internet, > appears to be the only way to go <sigh>. I sure hope not...it takes even longer for them to bring up a new long-haul link than it does for us to upgrade or bring in a new local circuit to one of the major tier-1's. And a reply from the second ISPer: "I just cant agree with the last part of this. I am sure in some markets you can bring up a local circuit to a major tier1. But not in all markets. If some medium to large providers have dark fibre and place some of the more advanced optical gear on it (ala Sycamore) you could turn up circuits in minutes using something eccentric like say your Netscape browser. So let's say you have a colo in a great location across town without tier1s in it, but with many other important considerations. If you have your own fibre and run it to the major CO or colo meet me point in town, you could then turnup circuits on the fly as you needed them. Moving forward there may be some other neat tricks coming down the pipe where it may not even take human intervention to provision that bandwidth on the fly. You might not only attract some tier1s to the colo for that cheap capacity, but may even be able to work a trade out for the 22 OC48s worth of protected bandwidth on 2 strands. Would these things change your view??? Glass is Freedom, ------- Note: A number of the more forward looking peering entities are already into on the fly bandwidth provisioning for their tenants and peers. Above.net, to name just one, has been doing this for a while now. And it's never as simple as providing more pipe, only. There are the other audit and accounting issues which must be logged, as well, not to mention dragging all of the policy and QoS issues along. These are just some of the other aspects which fall under the network management umbrella which demand integration in software, besides traffic management and the optical layer controls.