[c-nsp] Thoughts on the ASR9902?

[Mark Tinka]

On 10/11/24 17:52, Drew Weaver wrote:

> ------
> Yeah, it sometimes almost feels as though traditional vendors are hastening the [for lack of a nicer term] enshittification of the Internet to their own detriment in a short term vs long term sense.
>
> It has to suck for them that the aforementioned 5-6 content networks basically side stepped them entirely but we know why they did it.

They are desperately clinging on to a model that does not work outside 
of 3 or 4 customers... the AT&T's, Verizon's, NTT's and Deutsche 
Telekom's of the world. The model they use for those customers does not 
work for the majority of the ISP market.

I had a call with a Juniper employee yesterday who wanted to understand 
whether modern ISP's are for opex or capex models. I told him opex makes 
sense for small ISP's, or ISP's just starting out. But at some point 
(and that is arbitrary for each ISP), opex models become inferior to 
capex models. The problem with capex models is that vendors don't know 
how to do them well, and will maintain a large opex revenue base with 
each customer through TAC support fees, which negates any capex model gains.

Like large telco's in a market of shrinking transit and DIA margins, 
traditional OEM vendors of old are struggling to maintain all the 
overhead they have accrued when the few customers buying from them are 
reducing their spend YoY, and the massive but low-spend customers are 
moving on to more sensible OEM's.


>   But I also don't think Broadcom is here to save anyone. So we're kind of stuck. Sadly.

Broadcom have certainly done their bit to democratize silicon packet 
forwarding. The true benefit will come when we have a multitude of 
well-supported, open-source NOS's that are compatible with the emerging 
white box vendors.

Considering what is happening in the optical world with MSA, OpenROADM, 
OIF, OpenZR and OpenXR, options that challenge traditional models are 
well on their way to creaming to the top. And I don't think the IP/MPLS 
world shall be spared.

Mark.