> Well, with the GSR (and alike) you're paying for high MTBF, large buffers > and quick re-routing when something happens, so yes, this is a quality > issue and that's why you should care and make an informed decision.
There's more than one way to do things. Some people manage MTBF by having more cheaper boxes in a resilient architecture so that the failure of a box has minimal impact on the transport of packets. Some people don't have buffers in their routers because they provide a consistently low latency service (low jitter). Some people do rerouting at the SDH layer so that routers don't need to reroute. Or they put a lot of effort into managing their lower layers so that failures happen very infrequently and therefore routers don't need to reroute. To make a truly informed decision you need hard data on network performance. Brands and models of routers are irrelevant. When I look at point-to-point latency graphs on a network and see constantly varying latency in almost a sine wave pattern, I know that the provider is doing something wrong. I may not know whether it is too-large buffers on the routers, congested circuit, or poorly managed underlying ATM/FR network, but the data tells the true story. If you care about quality, don't buy unless you can see hard data on the network's performance over a reasonable time period, i.e. 6 months to a year. And not everybody needs to care about quality that much. -Michael Dillon