http://computerworld.co.nz/news.nsf/NL/521EAD83FE6DFDD5CC2571170075289F

You have hit a sore point there Juha.

A very large portion of the cost of UBS for an ISP (that does not already
have Telecom ATM) is the NNI connection that UBS comes over. Even worse is
it is not possible to set up redundancy, all UBS connections must come over
a single NNI and can not be switched over to a backup circuit if there is a
failure in that NNI.

If you are looking for an example of how to throw away lots of money at bad
network design then UBS is the perfect candidate.

Best practice network design is scalable, robust (e.g. has redundant
paths/hardware) and carries a low cost of ownership.

UBS is the opposite for all of these, it is based around a single, bloody
expensive, old technology ATM NNI interface. You can not load balance across
multiple redundant circuits and if your ATM "dies" you are dead in the
water.

Contrast this with TelstraClear's wholesale L2DSL service. We have two sites
(primary + disaster), Telstraclear bring L2DSL to our LNS servers via
Ethernet fibre to each of our sites. We can switch between sites and load
balance between multiple LNS servers at each site. This network was so cheap
to set up we didn't even do a formal budget (and obviously these savings
will trickle down to our clients).

However for UBS the costs are scary relative to the income and lifetime of
the equipment. We were looking at costs of $50k-100k to buy old outdated ATM
equipment and $10k a month for a broken network that may only have a life of
a year or two. We decided that this was a bad investment, you would have to
have no brains or no choice to implement this network topology.

So you can see why ISPs are squelling, the headline "per user" wholesale UBS
cost is not the only "cost" involved.

Nearly two years ago we requested UBS via Ethernet from Telecom - were are
still waiting.

Cheers

BG

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