But basically I was thinking about Packet-over-SONET (POS), which is "PPP encapsulated HDLC framed IP". So after the POS link was terminated, I imagined that this little device would basically now look at the raw IP and do some pre-processing before the packets hit either an NP or switch fabric. However, in the vast majority of commercial POS links, they're not mapped over a pipe as big as STS-48c...they'd be mapped over STS-3c or below. This would mean the device is not super-suitable for most SONET-mapped applications.
There may be some PPP framing in there instead of HDLC,
but it's still just one channel; if you've got a bunch of channels
(e.g. a bunch of 155Mbps STS-3Cs on a 2.4Gbps OC48), you're handing them to a bunch
of different people to deal with, not doing a 2Gbps encrypt/decrypt at the high speed.
This device is really useful for the people who've got OC48c pipes,
or increasingly commonly, GigE pipes.
But I guess that's OK...it's not supposed to be. It's really geared for MAN/WAN Ethernet (which once in a while is mapped over SONET). But it always pisses me off when GbE=WAN in marketing product literature. Nobody actually runs GbE outside their TSB (Tall Shiny Building) or campus...yet (and to date there's no strong indication they will).
You'd be surprised - we're seeing tons of interest in it at AT&T, partly because of MAN vendors like Yipes and OnFiber (who bought Telseon) and partly because GigE boards cost $59 at Fry's and Cisco 12000's are ~$100K. (yes, yes, I know there are significant technical differences, but you can get long-distance fiber NICs for about $1-2K, and the LAN switches really are as cheap as $300 or so.)
Some of the metropolitan area equipment really is GigE (half or full duplex),
while some is only OC12 (622 Mbps), and most of the wide-area stuff is really OC12,
and the major cost of running fiber access is getting right-of-way and
digging up the streets, so why not crank it as fast as possible?
High-speed access used to mostly be T3 and OC3 going into metro SONET muxes,
but there's increasing amounts of Ether and DWDM and some CWDM (4-8 wavelength OC48/GigE),
though the rollout speed depends on whether towns are issuing building permits
faster than bankruptcy courts are issuing Chapter 11s.
The other fast local bandwidth market that's been emerging is Storage Area Networks.
Fibre Channel and some of the other computer-to-disk-farm standards are now
able to get distances of 20-50km on fiber, so we're seeing things like
Wall Street mainframe farms that have disk drives in New Jersey data centers,
with redundant dual-ring access, providing real physical redundancy
and letting you save some critical and expensive real estate.
The stock market being what it is, lots more of those bits are zeroes instead
of ones now, so I'm not sure how fast the investment is going now,
but in early 2002 it was pretty aggressive. That's not as much of an IPSEC market,
but the people running those computers do have enough data to fill pipes
going to other locations, and the incentive to keep it encrypted.
