[j-nsp] Segment Routing Real World Deployment (was: VPC mc-lag)

[Mark Tinka]

On 10/Jul/18 21:33, adamv0025 at netconsultings.com wrote:

> Speaking for the Carrier Ethernet market here,
>
> There was a huge market potential several years ago for p2p PWs (I don't
> really know what the situation is nowadays). 
> It all started the same way as the shift from leased lines to Frame-Relay. 
> Leased lines where expensive and not very profitable for service providers
> -so instead of selling a leased-line between point A and B to one customer
> SPs put a FR switch at each end and sold it to 10 customers.
> Same happened several years ago with operators who owned their own fibres or
> had enough lambdas -you can't make good money selling wavelengths -and
> besides it's not like people need SONET or SDH -everyone converged on
> Ethernet, so what do you do? You stick a PE router at each end of the lambda
> and you sell it to 10 customers instead.
> Customers can't tell the difference cause this thing is like an Ethernet
> cable between point A and point B -and you sell it at a much lower price
> point in comparison to wavelength so it becomes very attractive to a lot of
> folks who could not afford a dedicated wavelength or fibre.
> The p2p PW were the killer app, for providing services to all the smaller
> SPs that wanted to expand their MPLS backbones across the country or even to
> other countries but did not quite qualify for dedicated fibre or lambda to
> some remote places that we had covered. But this was also used by large SPs
> like at&t, etc.. to extend their (mostly) PE-CE links to places where they
> did not have their own infrastructure. 
> ENNIs to other Carrier-Ethernet providers and of course MEF standardization
> made it really easy to stretch these PW services all over the place.
> And we all did use just simple p2p PWs, no mac learning, just simple what
> goes in goes out including L2CPs. 
> This was carriers providing services to other carriers.
>
> Now with corporate customers or  DC folks the story was always "yeah this
> l2vpn stuff is hot right now we need that too", but if you talked to them it
> turned out what they really needed was just a series of p2p links -no one
> wanted to have mac limits imposed on them or be haunted by the complexity of
> mp2mp and large l2 domains.  
>
> So where we used what someone might call VPLS (bunch of PW into a BD) was
> primarily for internal services for l2 backhauling.   
>
> As you can see my experience is quite the opposite, that is no really much
> of mp2mp or p2mp VPLS style services, but a whole lot of p2p PWs all over
> the place. 

>From an African perspective, leasing backhaul in Europe is cheap. The
cost of 10Gbps or 100Gbps EoDWDM makes so much sense, there is no need
to build our own routes. In such an instance, EoMPLS wouldn't work for
us. Also, it's a lot cheaper for an operator to deliver 10Gbps or
100Gbps via EoDWDM than via EoMPLS, to another operator.

With Africa growing so fast right now, B-end circuits are all over the
place. So delivering anywhere from 2Mbps - 10Gbps via p2p LDP-based
EoMPLS pw's is big business as well. Like I mentioned before, most
customers don't really care how it works, as long as the capability and
the price is right.

Africa is not yet at a stage where a simple enterprise business can call
an operator for an EoDWDM service. But it is at a place where they can
call an operator for an EoMPLS service, because those work out much
better at various bandwidth options, unlike pure EoDWDM.

Mark.