Re: Broadband initiatives - impact to your network?

[Lamar Owen <lowen () pari edu>]

On Monday, June 28, 2010 06:50:10 pm Randy Bush wrote:
> > The question, in my mind, is whether it's reasonable to ask that
> > regional providers reach the same bar as privately owned campus
> > networks.
>
> you are comparing LAN to WAN, never a bright idea

Even ATM years ago blurred that arbitrary line.

Why does there even need to be a line between local and wide in terms of networking?  As far as IP is concerned, there 
is no difference.  Even as far as Ethernet is concerned, there is no difference.  It's ATM's promise all over again 
with people reinventing wheels that shouldn't have to be reinvented....WAN's exist for demarcation, typically, at least 
in the way I've used them (I used a POS OC3 over a 35 mile path for three years as a LANish link, with the WAN link 
that had BGP speakers attached being FastEthernet... talk about blurring a line; and now I use a L3VPN tunnel on a 
WANish Metro Ethernet link to replace the direct OC3 LAN link....))

The BTOP applications of which I'm familiar could just as easily carry traffic that would traditionally be classified 
as local area; or even storage area, for that matter, as fibre channel in particular does very well over long distances 
(run IP on FC, and get better than Ethernet throughput for less money, even.... :-)).  Drop a wave mux in, hit it with 
intermediate reach optics, up the number of buffers (on FC, at least, and pay the license for the larger buffers, to 
vendor B at least), and drop your storage elsewhere.  I'd rather get a wave than IP or even SONET transport any day.  
Wish it were an option here.

And I see the BTOP ARRA apps having the potential, if done right, to extend the 'LAN' (as opposed to 'broadcast domain' 
even though I know many use the two terms synonymously) to a global reach.  

WAN's historically have been differentiated by lower bandwidth, greater segmentation/demarcation of traffic, and higher 
cost relative to LAN links; BTOP has the potential to eliminate that distinction.