[2537] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Re: Trust and the T-3 Network - encore
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Stan Barber)
Sat Mar 14 14:19:06 1992
From: sob@tmc.edu (Stan Barber)
Date: Sat, 14 Mar 1992 13:17:55 CST
To: cook@tmn.com (Gordon Cook), com-priv@psi.com
I am part of an SMDS trial here in Houston, so I hear about some things
the industry can and can't do well right now. Not too many vendors are
shipping T3 stuff right now. Lots of announcements in this area, but very
little real live product.
Many vendors are just now doing OSPF and BGP correctly. Some major players
are still not shipping it, although I expect this to change rapidly as we get
closer to the end of the year. I would expect that at the CIXes and FIXes there
are all kinds of routing information translations going on to suit the flavor
used by the various networks involved. Maybe some day there will be one true
routing protocol, but there is not one now.
My belief is that Merit (or any network provider) has pretty much stuck to
one vendor's routers to insure interoperability and ease of management. [The
enterprise MIBs usually have the really interesting stuff in them like memory
usage and CPU statistics.] In a truely open networking environment, routers
supporting the standard protocols would all interoperate at all levels. In
reality this is not always true.
Moving from one hardware base to another is not trivial, but it has been
done in the past and can be done again if necessary. Merit is currently
in the process of migrating from NSS technology to the CNSS/ENSS architecture
now. The next step could be off-the-shelf technology or it could be some
kind of SONET/ATM stuff. Certainly the SONET/ATM stuff must be done as that
looks to be the path to gigabits.
I make all the comments based on what I have observed in the Internet and not
based on any futures planning by ANS/Merit/IBM/MCI, so I (like Gordon) would
welcome some information in that area.
--
Stan internet: sob@bcm.tmc.edu Director, Networking
Olan uucp: rutgers!bcm!sob and Systems Support
Barber Opinions expressed are only mine. Baylor College of Medicine
