Port numbers and traffic data

[Ian Batten]

On 23 Apr 08, at 0912, Brian Morrison wrote:
> On Tue, 22 Apr 2008 23:22:22 +0100
> Ian Batten <igb@batten.eu.org> wrote:
>
>>> assuming that more bandwidth is impossible (and it seems to be).
>>
>> Not impossible; expensive.
>
> It's not even that AFAICS, it's that lighting the fibre that's already
> there would reduce the cost per unit of bandwidth and lead to reduced
> revenues.

These sort of conspiracies were trotted out over alleged plots by BT  
to delay ADSL in order to prop up Nx64 and Megastream revenues.   
They're nonsense, simply because BT is too big to run a conspiracy  
like that: the people who see the revenue increase don't even know  
about the people whose revenue decreases.  In the instant example,  
selling 10x bandwidth at 0.2x the unit cost is 2x the revenue, and if  
the original profit was 10% it's now 110%, ie 11x better.

But, but, but this all excludes capital costs.  At the moment, the  
backhaul from DSLAM sites for most operators is LES1000 or OC-3, and  
there's not a lot of DWDM involved.  There's some SDH, but not as much  
as you might think: last time I looked, there were GigE or OC-3 tails  
from exchanges back to the operator's core network and then SDH or ---  
perhaps --- DWDM.  So using the lambdas to get better density on the  
same fibres in the second mile would involve putting DWDM kit into  
local exchanges, and although it's cheap it's not _that_ cheap.

For operators who have their own fibre DSLAMs with 10GigE are coming.   
In theory you could group 10 DSLAMs with GigE uplink and then use a  
switch to delivery 10GigE into the fibre, except back in the real  
world there are few, if any exchanges where one single operator would  
have that density: it would be many tens of thousands of lines.

> BT found a way to go back to usage based charging and I'm
> sure they'll hang on to it for grim death.

Nothing's stopping operators from running their own core network in.   
Several operators have.  Should Ofcom make their capital investment  
worthless by driving down BT's wholesale charges?

ian