Anyway, Bill Stewart wrote...
You'd be surprised - we're seeing tons of interest in it at AT&T,
partly because of MAN vendors like Yipes and OnFiber (who bought Telseon)
and partly because GigE boards cost $59 at Fry's and Cisco 12000's are ~$100K.
(yes, yes, I know there are significant technical differences,
but you can get long-distance fiber NICs for about $1-2K,
and the LAN switches really are as cheap as $300 or so.)
Well, I can see Enterprises extending their LANs with ethernet switches + cheap optics, but that just won't fly with the service providers, or OPS costs will eat their lunch. Hence reliability, NEBs, and protection capabilities will bring ethernet-based MAN costs up to meet SONET, where costs have been dropping dramatically.
(The 10GbE MAN PHY that has a "lite" version of SONET framing will be where we see Ethernet start actually displacing circuit switching in the Metro market.)
Some of the metropolitan area equipment really is GigE (half or full duplex),
Although its seems quibbling to point it out, half duplex GbE would only exist, theoretically, on copper, and that won't carry a GbE very far. (Plus, did IEEE even bother defining a half duplex GbE?)
while some is only OC12 (622 Mbps), and most of the wide-area stuff is really OC12,
and the major cost of running fiber access is getting right-of-way and
digging up the streets, so why not crank it as fast as possible?
Yes, I've thought that we might get to the point where everything is OC-48, and if you don't need the bandwidth don't use it.
High-speed access used to mostly be T3 and OC3 going into metro SONET muxes,
but there's increasing amounts of Ether and DWDM and some CWDM (4-8 wavelength OC48/GigE),
CWDM is really going to kick some booty, I predict. Particularly when your LAN guy can take an old Ethernet switch with GBICs or SFPs and slap in CWDM lasers (the MUXs, etc...he can buy off the shelf). DWDM has been and will be confined to niche applications in the Metro, only to where there's no more fiber and they can't get permits to lay more.
The other fast local bandwidth market that's been emerging is Storage Area Networks.
Fibre Channel and some of the other computer-to-disk-farm standards are now
able to get distances of 20-50km on fiber, so we're seeing things like
Wall Street mainframe farms that have disk drives in New Jersey data centers,
Hence the success of companies like Adva. (But won't SANs soon go over IP?)
of ones now, so I'm not sure how fast the investment is going now,
but in early 2002 it was pretty aggressive. That's not as much of an IPSEC market,
but the people running those computers do have enough data to fill pipes
going to other locations, and the incentive to keep it encrypted.
Well, here's where my knowledge goes bye-bye. What if you have a Cogent-like service provider, dumping everybody's traffic onto one big, fat pipe. Can IPSec be of use here? (In other words, will IPSec ensure that any customer's traffic will be protected from any other customer sharing that pipe? I thought it was pretty much all-or-nothing, which might make that cheap not too useful for anything but fancy enterprize gear...)
-TD
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