Re: best effort has economic problems

[Mikael Abrahamsson <swmike () swm pp se>]

On Mon, 31 May 2004, Simon Leinen wrote:

> I don't think there's 10 GE WAN PHY for the Cisco 7600 yet.  It has
> very cost-effective 10 GE *LAN* PHY (10.0 Gb/s, not SONET-compatible)
> interfaces though, which I find even more interesting (see below).

Cisco won't release a WAN PHY for a long time and it'll likely be quite
expensive since it competes with their other (even more expensive) OC192 
stuff. (Yeah, there is most likely a technical reason also, they want to 
do extensive testing).

Also, Cisco is as far as I know now the only player in the market which
code SFPs and Xenpaks to avoid impacting their very nice business case of
500+ % markup on optics.

I have beta units of WAN PHY Xenpaks directly from the manufacturer, they
work nicely in Extreme equipment, unfortunately when putting them into a
7600 it wont even activate them and Cisco doesn't seem very keen on
supplying an IOS that doesn't have this limitation so I can test it at all
(they've had 8 working days now).
 
> We find that the L1 equipment is getting much cheaper too, especially
> in the 10 GE LAN PHY space.  Think DWDM XENPAKs (or XFPs), which go
> 70-100 kms and which can be multiplexed and amplified with pretty
> affordable optical equipment.  If you're not interested in
> carrier-class boxes, "traditional" WDM equipment can sometimes be
> replaced with active parts that mostly look like GBICs, and passive
> parts that look like funny cables...

I know of DWDM GBICs, they've been around for quite some time. Just a 
matter of time until we get DWDM Xenpaks as well. I've also tried the 
CWDM OADMs which come on some patch cables. Nice if you want to do it in a 
small scale point to point.

The thing speaking against cheaper DWDM stuff is that the transmission 
people aren't very happy about letting in "uncontrolled" equipment 
directly into their combiners/OADMs, especially when it comes to 
controlling power levels etc.

-- 
Mikael Abrahamsson    email: swmike () swm pp se