North American Network Operators Group

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Why SVCs are useful

  • From: Kent W. England
  • Date: Sat Oct 12 01:07:28 1996

At 12:52 PM 10-10-96 -0800, you wrote:
>| would you mind expanding a bit on why SVCs would do the job?
>| We're trying to determine if it's a service worth offering anytime
>| soon, who would use it, etc.,
>

Basically SVCs are easier to support and more robust than PVCs, even if all
you do is nail them up like PVCs.

As an example, say an ATM service provider sets up a L2 service and a bunch
of ISPs come and begin to interconnect bi-laterally. Each PVC has to be
coordinated
among three parties -- two ISPs and the ATM service provider. This is time
consuming
and error prone, but workable. Now, suppose after all this has been set up,
something 
happens to the ATM switch and it forgets about a PVC. (Of course this would
never
happen, just like no router would ever get in a strange state and forget a
route.) 
There is nothing on the endpoints able to re-establish the circuit, even
though it is 
obvious that it is down or missing. No one on the endpoints can change the
QoS or
reconfigure their circuits and no one can set up their connection to accept
new
connection requests on demand, etc.

In short, even without thinking about futuristic bandwidth on demand, SVCs
would make
the current classical paradigm easier to manage and more robust. Your first
customer
is your current service delivery department and NOC.

--Kent

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