From: James (james@towardex.com)
Date: Tue Jul 20 2004 - 16:39:23 GMT-3
> Sounds like fancy marketing terms to me. I'm sure when AT&T
> says "Private Network Transport" they mean MPLS VPN, and when Quest says
> "Smart PVC" they mean MPLS TE.
I *believe* Qwest transport service is Martini|AToM L2TP. Qwest calls this
DIT or "Dedicated IP Transport", unless this "Smart PVC" is a different
product for similar reasons.
>
> You might also consider optical transport from providers such as
> http://www.cogentco.com/ or http://www.lightpath.net/. By using DWDM
Cogent transport is completely Layer3. They will give you RFC1918 hand off
addresses at both sites and route it over their core network going thru
layer3 hops. If you want to use that transport to route traffic over, then
you need to tunnel it through using GRE. It may not be viable solutoin if
you want to push a lot of packets through a routed-GRE tunnel on a Cisco.
Try Juniper+Tunnel Services PIC (or if your RE is fast enough, then
sysctl -w kern.pfe.re_transit=1) or a fast PC running *nix instead if you
are going that path of using tunneled transport, and planning on pushing
full 100Mb port at ~linerate.
> these providers are able to offer dedicated bandwidth for very cheap.
> Also, since places like Cogent actually own the SONET ring end-to-end
> across the US, transport between two sites running Cogent circuits is
> blazing fast.
Only if you are using the addresses they provide you to simply pass data.
If you want to route traffic over as a single-hop transport circuit, tunnel
is needed, which then places the whole throughput=performance_of_your_router
scale into its limit.
All in all, I've been a happy cogent transport cust for what they charge. :)
-J
>
> In any case what you most want to look at is what the SLA on the
> circuit is, and what provisions the provider has for when they are not
> meeting the SLA.
>
-- James Jun TowardEX Technologies, Inc. Technical Lead Network Design, Consulting, IT Outsourcing james@towardex.com Boston-based Colocation & Bandwidth Services cell: 1(978)-394-2867 web: http://www.towardex.com , noc: www.twdx.net
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