How big a market?

[Howard Frazier <hfrazier@xxxxxxxxx>]

One of the things that the HSSG is supposed to consider is "Broad
Market Potential".  This is the first of the 5 Criteria that we must
evaluate.

But what does "Broad Market Potential" mean?

Well, if you are talking about Ethernet, it means 100s of millions of
10 Mbps ports, 10s of millions of Fast ethernet ports, millions of
Gigabit Ethernet ports.  Shall we conservatively estimate 100s of
thousands of 10 Gigabit Ethernet ports, for starters?  I think that's
reasonable. 

In several messages that have been posted to this reflector, a
sentiment along the lines of "If we don't adopt the SONET signaling
rate, 10 gigabit ethernet will fail to realize its potential in the
WAN", has been expressed in various ways by various people.

Can some one quantify this?  I am willing to accept a volume projection
of 100s of thousands of 10 Gig ports per year in the LAN market alone,
because this is a reasonable extrapolation from the shipment rates of
10, 100 and 1000 Mbps ethernet ports.  As we go up in speed by a factor
of 10, the volume goes down by a factor of ten.

How many OC-192 ports ship per year? Millions? Hundreds of thousands?
10s of thousands?

Another (in fact the last) of the 5 Criteria is Economic Feasibility.
Since we can't talk about pricing, and we can't talk about absolute
costs, we have to discuss things in terms of relative cost, and we
generally compare the project under consideration to a project which
has gone before, like the last generation of ethernet.

I have heard statements like "The cost will be higher if we don't
adopt the SONET signaling rate".  I am left to wonder whether this
is meant to imply that we can't satisfy the 5th criteria unless we
adopt the SONET signaling rate.

Can some one quantify this?  Remember, we can only talk about relative
costs, and we can't talk about prices at all. What would be the
relative cost of a 9.whatever scrambled SONET PHY versus some of the
other proposals which have been made, such as:

  1) A 10 Gbps serial PHY running at 12.5 GBaud over 2 km of SMF 
  2) A 4 channel CWDM PHY running at 4 x 3.125 GBaud over
     100-300 meters of MMF, or 2 km of SMF.  
  3) A 4 level MAS PHY operating over the same distances as #2.

I realize that several other proposals have been made, and I don't mean
to slight them.  I have a better understanding of the costs of the
three I mentioned, so those are the most important for comparison from
my perspective.

Howard Frazier
Cisco Systems, Inc.