On 12/30/2014 5:05 PM, Mike Hammett wrote:
How many WISPs have heard of MEF or CE or even VPLS?
So... have you asked for it yet? :-p
supp...@mikrotik.com
I may have once asked somebody from MT about it, maybe at a show, and
they gave the predicted answer, that they're a *router* company. Sort of
like DEC, which was a inicomputer company.
Of course MEF has a lot of specs now. They aren't all critical, but
support for the basic connection types, with QoS, is what matters. But
this is foreign to the whole Linux-router market. Linux is a fossil of
the early 1990s, when eye pee was still sort of the new thing, and
everything else was assumed to be the enemy, or the eeevull telephone
company. RouterOS is basically a lot of lipstick on top of Linux. That
world still assumes that connectionless is next to godliness, that QoS
is impossible, and that Ethernet is orange hose tied together with
MAC-table bridges.
For those unfamiliar with it, Carrier Ethernet, which is standardized by
the Metro Ethernet Forum, uses the Ethernet frame format to provide a
wide range of services that aren't bridging. There's point to point
Ethernet Private Line, there's PtMP Ethernet Virtual Private Line, and
there's MPtMP LAN emulation. It's usually connection-oriented, using
the VLAN tag as the connection ID, not the MAC. It offers CIR+EIR
support ("three color"). It is protocol-agnostic to higher layers. It
is manageable. And with the new SPB, it has OSPF routing between
network elements, not just RSTP.
In other words, it's Ethernet Formatted Frame Relay. And that's good;
it's an improvement over the original slow telco FR. It's the
fastest-growing area in telecom (it's the new standard for cellular
backhaul, for instance). But it's not ideologically part of the Linux/IP
family, and people from that world (which includes most WISP suppliers)
neither understand it nor understand why it's needed.
--
Fred R. Goldstein k1io fred "at" interisle.net
Interisle Consulting Group
+1 617 795 2701
_______________________________________________
Wireless mailing list
Wireless@wispa.org
http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless
