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cost of doing business (was:Re: OpenTransit (france telecom) depeerscogent)

  • From: Mikael Abrahamsson
  • Date: Sat Apr 16 12:35:14 2005

On Sat, 16 Apr 2005, Stephen J. Wilcox wrote:

In general I'd prefer to operate in a healthy marketplace, where all parties are making money, theres little risk of the supplier filing bankrupcty and I am getting reasonable customers service. That can only lead to growth of the industry, healthy businesses and healthy economies. Unforunately none of these things appear to be happening at the moment...
Yes, it's quite interesting what has happened the past few years. I have seen Cisco OC48E/POS-SR-SC cards on the used market sell at $3500 back in 2001/02, go up to $20k in 2004 and they seem to go for around $10-12k now.

I also did some other calculations. Let's say the average packet traverses 5 GSR-GSR links and you want to pay the CAPEX over 36 months and let's say on average you fill half those with customer paying traffic. Let's assume you get 50% discount from cisco on these cards and you want to build OC192 links:

List price for OC192 cards are $225k, you need 10 of them which with the above equals 225000*10*.5=1125k.

At 1125k CAPEX you can carry 5gigabit/s of customer traffic, over 36 months this boils down to 1125000/36/5000=6.25.

So just the Cisco linecard CAPEX cost alone for this is $6 / megabit. With the market price seemingly hovering around $15-25 / megabit/month in bulk, this is a large portion of the total cost, considering DWDM systems and people don't come cheap either.

So what will people do? Stop selling when their networks are full? Ignore the economics and let other business carry the cost of bulk internet? Go for cheaper platforms? Go bankrupt (if no other business can carry the cost) ?

My guess is that going to OC768 isn't going to be very cheap either...

--
Mikael Abrahamsson email: [email protected]