Date: Sat, 13 Oct 2001 22:09:44 -0700 From: "Ted Mittelstaedt" <tedm@toybox.placo.com> To: "Matt Dillon" <dillon@earth.backplane.com> Cc: <Bsdguru@aol.com>, <hackers@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: RE: RE: RE: Imagestream WanIC-520 interface cards Message-ID: <002101c1546e$703d8420$1401a8c0@tedm.placo.com> In-Reply-To: <200110140133.f9E1XHI45650@earth.backplane.com>
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>-----Original Message----- >From: Matt Dillon [mailto:dillon@earth.backplane.com] >Sent: Saturday, October 13, 2001 6:33 PM >To: Ted Mittelstaedt >Cc: Bsdguru@aol.com; hackers@FreeBSD.ORG >Subject: Re: RE: RE: Imagestream WanIC-520 interface cards > > >:on the Internet has been routers costing in the $100,000 range. Now, maybe >:BEST Internet is now wealthy enough that you can blow that kind of money on >:Cisco gear without thinking about it, but a lot of smaller ISP's are not. >: >:If you look at what happened last weekend on Sunday, and the number >of people >:that screamed about it, it's quite obvious that there are a huge number of >:gated and zebra boxes out there handling global routing. Take off those >:Cisco blinders, boy! ;-) >: >:Ted Mittelstaedt tedm@toybox.placo.com >:Author of: The FreeBSD Corporate Networker's Guide > > Hmm. Well, as a person who ran gated at BEST, has hacked on gated on > same, had to deal with BSDI and FreeBSD route table bugs, tracked down > OSPF bugs for a friend running gated, and otherwise spent hundreds of > hours (at least!) keeping boxes running gated operational... well, I'll > take the Cisco any day thank you very much! :-) As I've said I run both - and each has it's strengths and weaknesses. I've not had the problems you apparently did with gated. However, I'll admit that you probably ran it a lot earlier than I did, on a lot slower hardware than I, thus I'm benefiting from all the bug-squishing that you have done on gated and FreeBSD. I have found that CPU speed makes a huge difference. I have had lots of problems trying to run BGP and gated on anything slower than a 400Mhz system. > > If you are a small ISP and you have enough money to pay for two T1's, > you have enough money to buy a used router that can do BGP for you. > IMHO. > Probably for you or I because we both know Cisco and are familiar with the ins and outs of their stuff and know where to get used gear. But, if you do it the Cisco Way, where you go buy a new 7206VXR with a service contract - no way. In our market, and I swear this is true, we have CLEC's that are selling fractional T1's (split voice/data with add-drop DSU's) and they are charging less than $50 a month for 768k or greater feeds. It's competitive with DSL. The customer pays for the voice lines which are maybe $1-$5 cheaper per trunk than what the ILEC would charge, then gets in essense a free Internet feed. Now, obviously the CLEC is planning on the company growing and adding trunks onto that T1, because they are making their money off the voice circuits and the call termination payments that the RBOC's are paying them. So they give away the Internet service as an enticement. And, obviously it's crap - I've used a few of them and your lucky to get 128kbits/sec on a "768k point to point to the Internet" And these same CLECS are also still not profitable (according to the local business journal) and haven't been for years. But, the upshot is that it's tremendously depressed prices for point-to-point or Frame service in our market. It's a very hard sell to sell one of these circuits now and we usually have to walk the prospect over to another of our customers to demonstrate what a true 768Kbps is supposed to be like. Now I don't know if we are just in a over-wired market, although PDX has more Internet usage per capita than any other city in the country. But, I've heard about markets (like Phoenix) where there's only national providers and a single regional provider, all the other regional providers have gone out of business. In those markets, yes, the regional provider that has enough money to pay for 2 T1's probably can charge enough to afford a used router that will do BGP. But, in markets like ours, the margins are far, far thinner. You cut where it makes sense, and gated on FreeBSD makes sense for one of our border routers, (probably also for a second, I just haven't gotten around to replacing it) Given a choice between spending on a lot of networking hardware so we can say we are 100% Cisco, and spending the money on more bandwidth, the choice is obvious. Ted Mittelstaedt tedm@toybox.placo.com Author of: The FreeBSD Corporate Networker's Guide Book website: http://www.freebsd-corp-net-guide.com To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
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