Routing Integrity in the world of optical switched circuits

The routing and addressing issues are one of the many reasons why I don't believe in bandwidth on demand or switched optical circuits (remember ATM?). It gets even more complicated when you are trying to establish a number of circuits with a complex topology linking servers, databases and systems spanning many continents. Add in call blocking and long setup times and it makes circuit switching if any kind problematic at best.

As I have long stated I believe the value of optical networks is that easily allow users to be allocated network resources to create their long duration IP routed network which enables them to do their own traffic engineering optimized for their community or application spanning multiple network domain (hence UCLP). Switching of optical circuits is easy, but getting the addressing, firewall and routing right is very hard and cannot be done in micro-seconds -- BSA