Sascha Lenz [SLZ-RIPE] ---------------------- Small companies start with small routers, PC based Linux Quagga Boxes, or Routerboards, or Juniper J-Series or whatever - not really much costs here (see other replies). --------------
They will not be able to "start with small routers", because calculating constantly changing routes (presumable from several sources) costs processing power, routing decisions with huge routing table cost processing power, even receiving and sending plain packets costs processing power. And all this costs money. PC-based routers are not able to do all of this at once and in this anount. The "selfish" small ISPs could easily drive himself into trap of
trouble
when they have to spent much more money for equipment (and made all others do it) rather than using PA from LIR.
Don't worry about computing power, small ISPs usually are less than 200Mbit/s total upstreams, to even if they handle 1G with today's CPUs it is not a big deal (rather stability can be a problem). More, probably within 1-2 years there will be a set of drivers/kernel support of handling packets by high efficients processors from... graphics ;) ------------------ I'm waiting for the event some 10 years by now. Until now it is only bad predictions. Even at 200Mbit|s with 2 upstreams it is almost impossible to deal with full table. Regards, Vladislav Potapov IIAT, Ltd.