[c-nsp] Bandwidth/capacity per demand

[Peter Rathlev]

On Tue, 2011-01-11 at 11:23 -0200, Jeferson Guardia wrote:
> They sell the powerful hardware with a good throughput and etc, but limited
> to what he paid. If one day he needs more capacity, he would
> pay an additional and get a new "license" and be able to have more capacity
> in terms of performance.
> 
> I dont know if any of you have worked with any product that is set up this
> way, but I was wondering if Cisco has ever came up with something like this?

Cisco, and other vendors, have been doing this for a long time regarding
features, though not throughput AFAIK. Buy a Sup720 with IP Base
software and you have hardware capable of many things that you will only
get if you pay for a more expensive feature set. But it's probably quite
complex to limit throughput via a license-related scheme.

IMHO it would be a very bad idea anyway. License tiering is probably
here to stay, but I keep dreaming of a world without. :-)

> I am only asking you that because today I had a customer interested on
> planning a small IP backbone this way, saving money and at the same time
> being able to scalate easily to support drastic changes.

There's nothing preventing you or someone else to sell e.g. 100 Mbps
services on a 1 Gbps interface, policing the traffic. An upgrade would
be as simple as adjusting or removing the policer. I think that's pretty
normal for ISPs to do.

That presupposes that you sell them a service and not some hardware of
course.

-- 
Peter