Regarding the prospects of JNPR's (or other's) router ports getting cheaper over time (presumably vs plain digital/optical mux ports per b/s), it would be important to see what underlying factors would be driving toward that direction.
Intuition tells that it would be the other way, that routing and packet switching cards doing L3-L1 processing will get more costly (including to operate, consider management o/h, power consumption etc) relative to plain L1 or L0 transport cards per interface bit rate.
But as noted, the processing cost per transmitted bit rate is not the relevant factor to consider, instead it is the cost per revenue generating bit (assuming all actual payload bits carry same revenue level), and thus it also matters how efficiently or inefficiently the interfaces, cheap or not, get filled with actual payload traffic.
If there is an answer to better overall efficiencies, it appears that it would involve finding a way to improve the network usage efficiencies while keeping the carrier network processing level to minimum, ideally just L1 or L0, besides the provider/system domain boundaries where routing or gateways are needed.
That may not be what router-centric vendors wants to promote, at least until one would have an advantage in the new router/gw-light provider core networking; perhaps looking at this new direction might give JNPR advantage, considering eg
Why reinventing PBB-TE. Statically provisioned connections are a general transport network feature and can also be done with MPLS-TP. So no need to reinvent PBB-TE. MPLS-TP and Optical/ODU switching do not compete as such they complement each other. It is only the question when you switch over from packet to ODU/wavelength switching. In this a lot of factors play a role like equipment costs, network topology, traffic patterns which will even change over time.
IF (and this is a big IF) they are reinventing PBB-TE then I don't understand their fierce opposition to reuse the OAM described in IEEE 802.1ag and ITU-T Y.1731.
Good discussion, folks. I like Dcdragos's comparison to PBB-TE.
"With the Lights Out," I think you're asking the right questions. Luc Ceuppens was saying that part of Juniper's argument rests on the fact that router ports will get cheaper as time goes on ... apparently, if you do the math while taking that into account, you get an answer closer to Juniper's. I'll be interested to see this study they're working on.
The statement "In Juniper's thinking, MPLS-TP comes into play in an all-OTN network, when large ODU payloads are being shunted around. Juniper is talking about more finely grained units of traffic, carried over the optical transport network via MPLS"shows that Juniper does not understand the concept of MPLS-TP: there is NO relation between MPLS-TP and large ODU payloads or any other lower layer technology.
The intention of MPLS-TP is to provide the same OAM behaviour as other transport technologies (e.g. carrier class Ehernet, SDH, OTN) such that the service provider staff can maintain the network accross all technologies in the same way.
There are indications that it is beneficial to replace a Label Switched Path (LSP) by a sub-Lambda Switched Path (sLSP) as soon as that LSP has a bandwidth of 0.4Gbit/s or more. G.709 (OTN NNI) has been extended in 2009 to provide rigth sized sLSPs by means of a new flexible ODUk, referred to as the ODUflex. Such ODUflex can have any bit rate in the range from 1.25 to 100 Gbit/s. When carrying packets, bit rates of n x 1.25Gbit/s (n=1..80) are recommended. Multiple sLSPs are carried over one (10G, 40G, 100G) wavelength ("Lambda Switched Path"), filling this wavelength efficiently.
With the growing amount of video content, some operators already expect to have most of their core domain LSPs exceeding this 0.4Gbit/s threshold in the next two years. Those core networks will have replaced their LSPs in 2011 by sLSPs.
sLSPs start/end on the L2 and L3 PE nodes and are transported through the emerging multi-service, switched optical transport network (OTN).
sLSPs carry the L2 and L3 service layer packets (i.e. Ethernet and IP) directly via Generic Framing Procedure (GFP) based encapsulation. Lambda Switched Paths carry the sLSPs via Generic Mapping Procedure (GMP) based encapsulation.
The packet optical signals in those core networks will then contain the following protocols: Ethernet or IP, GFP, sLSP, GMP and LambdaSP.
While I don't totally agree with Juniper's router-centric network view, I think the JNPR guy is right on the following point:
q' Router bypass, in that case, would "end up adding wavelengths that are then not filled in the most efficient way." The result: What you save in router ports would be spent adding more P-OTS ports. 'q
However the flip side of this is that whatever router/switch-heavy network saves on wavelengths and optical equipment ports (by filling them more efficiently through packet stat muxing at each network junction), is spent on the router gear that gets more expensive the more finer the level of traffic processing.
So what gives - is the architecture work on finding best mix of routing, switching, muxing & optical transport sort of in vain if the efficiencies of any given architecture at one level are negated at another level?
Are the best savings then just in minimizing any spend on architecture work, or is there room for real efficiency gain and how?
It appears Juniper wants to maintain their relevance even in the optical-dominated P-OTS/OTN world where they do not really play with their routers. So, to avoid a router bypass, it seems they are reinventing PBB-TE, using MPLS labels instead of Destination MAC+VLAN combinations (as in PBB-TE), and maintaining the transport paradigm of statically provisioning MPLS "cross-connects" for a certain MPLS label on each node on the path. Unless other big router players endorse this, it will be restricted to a specific play in the nework.
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