The session wasn't named 10Gig and the Next-Gen network

The title of the panel was 10GigE and the Next-Gen Network, not 10G and the Next-Gen network. Why is Ethernet so key to the next gen network compared to 10G in general, and perhaps more importantly why has SONET/SDH becomes a 2nd class citizen in the network compared to Ethernet?

I could have only focused on how great our own network is and all the various Ethernet products we have and how they work, but I like to try give my presentations some general educational value or to be thought-provoking in some way. The last time I tried this at an Ethernet conference I was referred to as a fox in the hen-house, so I toned it down a bit and just provided some data for people to mull over.

You'll recall from a previous conversation about how cost scales in a network that as new technology is released you tend to get a 4x improvement in bandwidth for about twice the interface cost as the previous step. The chart below uses current pricing from router vendors for SONET/SDH interfaces. Notice the nice clean trend...cost/meg dropped as speed increases. Then it takes an unexpected twist when you hit 10G, and it flattens. What a shock it was when we had to finish budget planning the year before our vendors had released their pricing on 10G interfaces and we had to project their cost. We had to change some plans based on the price of a 10G interface being twice what we projected.

The next interesting thing that happened was that 10GigE intefaces came out and the pricing was half of what the SONET interface was! We got back to our 4x/double cost trend, but the catch was that it had to be a 10GigE interface. Perhaps there is some cost between the optics for SONET and Ethernet (as a result of volume), but enough to justify a difference of $90,000 in list price? This was only of limited usefulness to us, however, because there was no 10GigE WAN capability then, so it was only useful intra-POP.

Also notice the pricing of similar interfaces on a Switch/router. A switch/router is a platform that was originally introduced as an Ethernet Switch (e.g. a Cisco Catalyst 6500), but by replacing the main processor board with a router board, it becomes a router! Voila! When Switch/routers were first introduced, they lacked a great many features of their larger full-scale router-brethren had, but that's all changing now. Switch/routers not only have almost all of the software functionality of a larger-scale router, but they have POS interfaces as well. The price/meg on a 10GigE on a Foundry/Force10/Cisco OSR7600 is under $1/meg!

To further illustrate the disparity between routers and switch/routers, see the next chart. I've drawn a floating bar in the center of the chart that represents the range of prices for a 2.5Gig SONET circuit. If you can make the switch from a router to a switch router during your upgrade from a 2.5Gig platform to a 10Gig platform, you will actually see your total cost (not just your cost/meg) drop! That's right, your 10GigE interface will run you around $10,000/port vs. your old 2.5Gig SONET interfaces that run $25,000 and up.

I would prefer to have some illustrations of the architecture of a router vs. switch to show you, but the vendor presentations that I have that illustrate the material are all confidential. If you can get a hold of such drawings, you'll see that many of the different components that perform various functions inside the platform are pretty much the same. In short, there's not a lot of difference between a router and a switch/router from a hardware design aspect, any more than there is a difference between a 10GigE and a 10G SONET interface on a router. So why the huge cost disparity?

I will tell you that if these costs don't fall in line with each other soon, the players offering these big-iron boxes for tall prices are going to find themselves with a dead-end platform.

If they do drop their prices to compete, it may be too late for them to fix the trend. SONET may have lost favor, and it did nothing to deserve last place in that race...it is the victim of market dynamics.

Not only will switch/routers become increasingly popular, but 10G waves can be delivered as Ethernet as commonly as SONET on newer DWDM platforms.

And with the growth curve on the MPLS network looking like this next diagram, the typical SONET/SDH 4x jump is not enough. 10x jump, please! We need 100GigE, not 40G.

Here's a shout-out to Randall Pearl in our engineering department for providing all the figures used to make these charts.