Right now the market is served by two vendors: Cisco and Juniper. Is there room for a third player?
Certainly. If you take a look at the traditional telecom market, we have always seen a number of players. The question is really who is going to have sufficient technology as the Internet continues to grow.
What's the next big trend in IP routing?
As the Internet grows, we'll see some very interesting things in the optical plane. I'm not talking about optical routing so much as optical traffic engineering. We've discovered that some traffic engineering methods for IP translate directly into the optical layer. This would allow carriers to deploy and provision optical circuitry at a very rapid rate to reflect changes in traffic demand.
Would this save carriers money?
It should make it cheaper to operate their networks, and it could provide a business advantage over competitors. Right now, if a customer wants an OC-48 circuit, he has to wait almost six months for it to be provisioned. Time is money, and if the carrier could get that OC-48 (a 2.5-gigabit-per-second optical connection) up in an hour, that might be a business advantage.
