On Sat, 25 Sep 2010, Christopher J. Wargaski wrote:
This year I installed a video WAN comprised of several 3845 routers
with the NM-1T3/E3 for point to point DS3s (that is all, nothing
else). The 3845 routers list at $13,000 and the network module at
$8,500. You should do yourself and your firm a favor and look at
business class Ethernet. DS3s are so expensive and sometimes a major
pain in the butt.
For business class Ethernet, you most major carriers can offer you
something. Typically, fiber is pulled to your NetPOP and a switch is
installed, your hand-off is a switch port. The downside is the cost of
delivering fiber to your building which can often be quite prohibitive
unless you can amortize that cost over a number of years.
(Unfortunately, that may not be possible since the deliverable may not
be considered a product to your accounting department.)
There are other downsides [to metro ethernet] to consider. Using ethernet
for long haul, your devices at each end are no longer directly connected,
but will have a network (the provider's ethernet switches) between them.
Failures in "the network" will cause your ends to lose contact with each
other, while their interfaces remain up/up.
Depending on the speed provisioned by the provider, and the speed of your
networks, you can run into bursting/packet drops issues when your
1000baseT traffic hits the 10mbit or 100mbit metro-E.
Also, because your packets are flowing over the provider's switched
network, they typically ride a specific VLAN. If (no, when) the provider
screws up and puts another customer in the same VLAN, very strange things
will happen, particularly if you're both using the same RFC1918 IPs.
This is something you generally don't have to worry about with private
lines.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Jon Lewis, MCP :) | I route
Senior Network Engineer | therefore you are
Atlantic Net |
_________ http://www.lewis.org/~jlewis/pgp for PGP public key_________
_______________________________________________
cisco-nsp mailing list [email protected]
https://puck.nether.net/mailman/listinfo/cisco-nsp
archive at http://puck.nether.net/pipermail/cisco-nsp/
