North American Network Operators Group

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The trek across Canada

  • From: jlixfeld
  • Date: Thu Nov 05 02:30:41 1998

I'm looking for a cost-effective, highly reliable, high bandwidth, low
latency solution for a link in Canada between Vancouver and Toronto. 

I have a couple of ideas:

1)  Droping some type of high-speed interface into the frame-relay cloud
of a third party network like AT&T, Sprint, MetroNet, or whoever provides
this type of service. I think this would definetly be a scalable solution
as it would allow us to put POPs anywhere we like in between and it would
be as easy as running a circuit back into the frame cloud.  The only
issues with this is a) What are these networks like?  Are they reliable? 
Are they fast? Is their a risk of them not being able to provide us with
the bandwidth we paid for without performance loss due to lack of capacity
(QoS)?

2)  Assuming we buy our own fibre:  Do we run a direct link between
Toronto and Vancouver directly or drop a POP in between; somewhere in
Saskatchewan or Manitoba and running fibre out of there to each?  I may
like the direct route from A to B but how pricy is that and how scalable
is that?  If we plan do put POPs into some some cities along the way we'd
have to run pipes from those POPs back into either Toronto of Vancouver. 
If we go the route of A to B to C that would probably be a bit smarter as
the haul from POP to POP wouldn't be so large. 

Is it common practice for the National ISP to lay their own pipe or is it
more common practice to obtain the link from a third party?  How do the
UUNets, and BBNPlanets do it?  They are not telcos so laying a pipe is not
as easily justified.  Do they buy fibre between A and B or do they even go
through some sort of telco-like carrier?!

If anyone has any ideas, opinions, experiences, or something to sell me 
I'd love to hear from you!

Regards,

===( Jason Lixfeld )=======( Network Engineer - Internet Direct Canada )===
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