Re: Token ring? topic hijack: was Re: Mystery open source switching

["Justin M. Streiner" <streiner () cluebyfour org>]

On Thu, 4 Nov 2010, Jay Farrell wrote:

> My workplace migrated the last customer off SMDS maybe about 2 or 3
> years ago, but most of them were moved several years before that. My
> understanding is Vz could no longer buy gear to support SMDS and
> pretty much had to cannibalize existing equipment to keep it running.
> At one point when we still had 40-some customers on one SMDS DS3 hub
> circuit, we had an outage that spanned 3 days (fortunately into a
> weekend). Vz seemed to have only a few techs who were clueful on smds
> and, unless we were working with one of them, very often our techs
> would have to instruct Vz what to do (typically reloading all the
> addresses would restore service, IIRC).

Where I used to work, we had lots of dial POPs on SMDS, for good reasons 
at the time.  When we re-did our dial architecture around 2000-2001 to 
move away from physical POPs, we got rid of the SMDS service.  From what I 
remember, the month-to-month pricing after the contract ended was pretty 
ugly, so that was another incentive to dump it.

jms