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Re: Are people still building SONET networks from scratch?


From: Matthew Petach <mpetach () netflight com>
Date: Mon, 10 Sep 2012 13:43:03 -0700

This *was* a troll, right...?

On Mon, Sep 10, 2012 at 10:55 AM, david peahi <davidpeahi () gmail com> wrote:
In my neck of the woods, critical locations often exist "in the middle of
nowhere", resulting in underserved facilities, where best effort networks
such as metro Ethernet cannot be trusted to remain available 24x7x365. Many
times, during prime business hours,  I will see a telco metro Ethernet
spanning tree convergence which results in my traffic re-routing for 20-30
seconds over my private backup network path, then switching back to the
metro Ethernet path after the telco technicians have finished their
maintenance. Several times when I have called in a trouble ticket, the
telco tech has asked "what is the big deal, it was only a 20 second
outage?". In the Enterprise environment, a planned spanning tree
convergence in the middle of business hours is one of the quickest ways for
a network engineer to be relieved of their duties, but apparently the bar
is considerably lower in the telco environment.
Not only that, but the telco SLAs associated with metro Ethernet are
totally bogus, with a best round trip SLA of 20 milliseconds, ranging up to
50 milliseconds for "bronze" service. For short distances of 100 miles or
less (rule of thumb is that light travels over fiber at 0.80 x speed of
light, or 1000 miles in 10 milliseconds), an SLA of 20-50 milliseconds
 amounts to fraud,  just another way for the telcos to scam the consumer.
The tone of many of the entries on this thread where the user is depicted
as being unreasonable, underscores the need for a coordinated national
broadband policy in the USA, based upon the Australian model in which the
government is building out fiber to every residence and business, no matter
where they are located.

Regards,

David

If service is critical enough to me that 20 second hiccups make
a difference, I'll find two providers to provide connectivity to the
location via relatively cheap waves, and I'll run link-node protection
at my layer to get fast reconvergence in the sub-second range.
And I'd warrant it'll still come out cheaper than the government-built
costs we see in Australia.

I really, really don't think more government intervention is the right
answer.

Matt


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