OT: ISPs: Linux's role nowadays

[Bill Davidsen]

Michael Cronenworth wrote:
> On 02/24/2010 10:33 PM, Marcel Rieux wrote:
>> Is this correct?  Are there more explanations you can provide to make
>> the picture clearer?
>>
>
> Cisco has been allowed into the classroom in many high schools here in
> the USA. They teach you to use Cisco, and only Cisco, for all your
> networking needs. It's the only thing most IT people know about and the
> only vendor they will 'trust' all the way to their grave. Not that I
> agree with that. :) Juniper is a close second.
>
> IT people usually have very lax budgets (at least the one's I've known)
> and can afford to blow $5k-$10k on a single router for a small
> department. The most coveted excuse for using Cisco over anything else
> is their [Cisco's] "instant" turn around to customer support problems.
> They [IT] could care less about Linux because they know nothing about it.
>
Trust me, response time and lack of hardware problems are worth a lot of 
$$ at most ISPs, and the larger the ISP the more important. Remember 
that staff are paid, and someone looking at a router issue is not doing 
something else. fact of life, when you get larger than "mom and pop" ISP 
operations Cisco or similar is cheaper than Linux.

When I worked for SBC downtime was measured in sec/yr, or at least 
reported to us in that unit.