RE: Anybody using GBICs?

["Deepak Jain" <deepak () ai net>]

> Lance;
>
>       Having been on both sides of the fence, I know that it is hard
> for router development engineers, especially at legacy vendors, to know
> what is really going on in the market.  But for ISPs operators, the
> audience of this group, your question comes across as a "duh" moment.
>
>       Everyone I know is using GBICs on 95% of new purchases.  We are
> a regional provider in a relatively rural rural region (Maine and New
> Hampshire).  Even in this rural market 95% our purchases next year will
> be GBICs running GE.  However, most of those GBICs will have some
> involvement with Wave Division Multiplexing to get multi-GE rates.  10GE
> is just not needed right now by us, but I suspect people in more
> populated regions are using it.
>
>         POS, Sonet and ATM are dead except for small players and some
> legacy providers.  I am sure this is still significant niche.

The only reason someone isn't going to use a GBIC on a new GE purchase is
because
the vendor is requiring that we use SFPs or another pluggable standard to
get
what we are trying to accomplish. Cisco's 3750 is a good example of a
formerly
GBIC purchase that is now a 4xSFP purchase.

I can't think of any reason why you'd install equipment (new or used) today
that
uplinks at less than n x GE unless you have a large legacy investment or
user base.

If you question was a GBIC vs 1000BaseT question, that is a slightly
different
animal. Where ~100% of our networking purchases probably contained a GBIC
somewhere
last year, probably 5-10% of those this year are mostly 1000BaseT where
copper
is usable instead of fiber. This makes server -> network connectivity easier
and
less expensive.

Hope this helps,

Deepak Jain
AiNET