[120555] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: [NANOG] Roport on internet business
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (David Barak)
Wed Dec 23 21:47:21 2009
Date: Wed, 23 Dec 2009 18:46:46 -0800 (PST)
From: David Barak <thegameiam@yahoo.com>
To: nanog@nanog.org
In-Reply-To: <601584A0-AEB1-4E36-AD21-03586DF98F0F@puck.nether.net>
Errors-To: nanog-bounces+nanog.discuss=bloom-picayune.mit.edu@nanog.org
>----- Original Message ----
>From: Jared Mauch <jared@puck.nether.net>
>I know, watching my local incumbent they are not replacing damaged copper with fiber. I think they must have warehouses of it someplace. I can't imagine that it is good to replace buried copper w/copper during the wintertime. If you're out doing it, might as well *actually* install fiber in the conduit.
>(Unless it's about unions/job protection for the copper guys).
>- Jared (not saying unions are bad, but when you operate two assets and have a different union for each, it can limit your potential significantly).
One of the very hard things about running a large, geographically distributed layer 0/1 organization is managing the various and sundry physical cables from point to point. Replacing one bad span with a good span which is qualitatively different introduces a level of version control and management headache, and if done in a haphazard fashion can reduce the overall availability of the network. I don't know who your incumbent is, but it's reasonable to assume that they have some strategy for cable plant management which includes overall technology refresh at some point, with like-for-like replacement until then.
Also, last I checked, the specs on "how to build a good layer 0/1 fiber infrastructure" were different than those for copper - because the capabilities are different, the network architecture has different optimizations available.
This doesn't mean that the provider shouldn't be moving toward a large-scale fiber rollout - far from it! I just wanted to provide a reason why they might not want to do said rollout in a piecemeal fashion.
David Barak
Need Geek Rock? Try The Franchise:
http://www.listentothefranchise.com
