nanog mailing list archives

RE: MPLS VPNs or not?


From: Greg Maxwell <gmaxwell () martin fl us>
Date: Wed, 8 Aug 2001 11:05:26 -0400 (EDT)


On Wed, 8 Aug 2001, Kavi, Prabhu wrote:

I don't think UUNET considered it a waste. UUNET could not have grown
as quickly as it did during the mid to late 90s without L2 (Frame and
ATM) technologies.  Fortunately for them, they did not have any pure IP
only zealots that prevented the pragmatic use of other technologies
in their networks.  Otherwise they probably would not have been able
to outrun the other ISPs.
UUNET received two benefits from it:
      1.  Speed, since at the time L2 switches were faster
          than routers, and
      2.  Traffic engineering, which saved them money in transport
          costs.
Point 1 is no longer valid.  Point 2 is still valid.
UUNET built bigger and better networks at the time because of this.
The market decided that UUNET was right.  UUNET's shareholders were
well rewarded because of what you called this "waste".

I don't think you can make a strong argument on TE being that big of a
factor. It's more likely that the provider market's winner-take-all nature
combined with acquisitions and attrition contributed much more to their
growth then and benefits derived from traffic engineering.

Furthermore, it may be possible that complex traffic engineering is
becoming less of a factor as backbone networks become increasingly based on
physical transports that are less heterogenous (in terms of
log(backbone_speed/client access speed)).

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