[c-nsp] Downsides of combining P and PE functions into a single box

[Jared Mauch]

You are talking about low speed networks here. I was talking where access link equals core size. 

Somewhat similar to the intro to the movie "The Fifth Element" where they ask "what have you got that's bigger than x" and the response is nothing. When your customers have n*10g access, where do you place them? When they have n*100ge where do those go?

It is certainly not ideal to place them on an edge device then buy another pair or two to just uplink/passthrough to the core to passthrough to a peering edge. 

We may be networking but just on different scales. When you have 50+ 10g circuits on a path for traffic it makes you look at the costs differently than when you have one or two. 

It may also be the market in your part of the world can bear these higher costs. I've been hearing of sub-$1/meg contracts. Not sure what your price per meg is with all those layers. I'm seeing one player come back at nearly $100/meg in the us. They obviously will not be selected for transit. 

Jared Mauch

On Oct 19, 2011, at 2:55 PM, Mark Tinka <mtinka at globaltransit.net> wrote:

> On Thursday, October 20, 2011 01:03:43 AM Jared Mauch wrote:
> 
>>    If your customer is talking to a peer, place them on 
> the
>> same device.  Don't have a 'peering edge' vs 'customer
>> edge'.
> 
> Did that once, not going back.
> 
> We've once done the router reflector + border router thing. 
> Will never do that again, thank you very much :-).
> 
> It may make sense for some small outfits, or even simpler 
> ones. Doesn't make sense for us, and I'm sure a few others, 
> e.g., say you have a device that marks only on egress, you 
> want your customers to have DSCP value A, but your Internet 
> DSCP value is Z. How do you make that work with such a box?
> 
>>    It may make sense to terminate your 'core' links on 
> the
>> same device as well.  It may not.  This all depends. 
>> The problem here is how people think about the network. 
>> "There must be a core", or "you must transit a P
>> device".
> 
> This is very true. For some networks, there are no issues 
> with collapsing pretty much the entire network into one 
> device (I did that at one of the first ISP's I ever worked 
> at more than 10 years ago; the whole network was a single 
> Cisco 3640 router - peering, border, edge, everything).
> 
> Mark.