Re: long distance gigabit ethernet

["Barton F Bruce" <barton () cent net>]

The Cerent 454 (now cisco 15454) has 2 port Gig-E cards that cost a little
more than a PA-GE card. The pair of ports shares OC-12 available to that
slot (I'm assuming this is NOT an OC-192 equipped shelf) and the bandwidth
can be split in certain multiples of STSes (OC-1), or used totally for one
port. You only need as many STSes between boxes as you want to use.

You can play some nice games with 802.1Q VLANs and multiple sites, too.

There is a newer 4 port Cerent gig-E card I have not seen, but that probably
can do a FULL gig-E on at least 2 of the ports (i.e. use a full OC-48 if the
box has the OC-192 cross connect matrix installed). This newer card I think
is only for point to point and does not "understand" VLANS, though probably
can carry them.

Some DWDM boxes have their own gig-E ports. We have Sycamore ones that give
us several Boston, NYC, and Reston routers on the same ethernet.
Consider also that many switches support what cisco calls ether-channel. If
one gig-E isn't enough, add more in parallel. Any router on this "ethernet"
can freely talk to any other.

You are not stuck with just one router talking to one at the other end.

----- Original Message -----
From: "Antony" <antony () phenome org>
To: "Greg Pendergrass" <greg () band-x com>
Cc: "Richard A Steenbergen" <ras () e-gerbil net>; "'Nanog@Merit. Edu'"
<nanog () merit edu>
Sent: Friday, March 22, 2002 12:28 PM
Subject: Re: long distance gigabit ethernet


> On Fri, Mar 22, 2002 at 11:54:05AM -0500, Greg Pendergrass wrote:
> > I'm going to take a stab and assume that you're actually more interested
> > in finding a longhaul line with GigE on the ends, and not so much how
many
> > miles you can get with whatever optics...
> >
> > Absolutely right, I don't care what's in between as long as I have GigE
at
> > the end. Other options include using wave (too expensive), or ethernet
over
> > MPLS (worth considering although latency may be too high for longer that
> > 1000 miles).
>
> there are solutions of this type. SURFNet line, currently used for test
> and network research is an example.
> It is from Amsterdam to Chicago. It is presented as GigE at the ends.
>
> So fairly long distance, RTT is  93 msec.Actually it  terminate as
> SONET OC48  that goes too TDM Switch which has GigE interfaces.
> So there is SONET encapsulation in the middle. In theory we can get
> upto  2.5Gbps.
>
> Line is provided by Teleglobe. End equipements are
> CISCO,  ONS 15454. This don't do any routing.
>
> This page may be interesting to browse.
> http://carol.wins.uva.nl/~delaat/optical/index.html
>
> You can probably find different variants of such non standard technology
> from other carriers.
>
> -antony