Alcatel Speed – Understanding ‘Rate 10000 CIR 0’ on Alcatel Device

alcatel-lucent-7750speed

What does "rate 10000 cir 0" mean on an alcatel device?

  • I thought cir ment "committed information rate" but why would it be
    set on 0 in this example?
  • What does the "rate 10000" stand for?

Best Answer

User Teun Vink is very correct in his assertion that context is required, mainly in the platform that you are using and the configuration that the rate is being applied to, whether QoS or service utilization. Nevertheless, here is some basic information:

CIR is your committed rate, which is the desired bandwidth of a service. It is not an indication of maximum, but a reservation of minimum bandwidth on the available interfaces the services is built. In an Alcatel-Lucent service router, the CIR is measured in kbps. As an example, if you have a 10gbps port and your services' CIR is 1048576, then your service has reserved all 1gbps of the port. If you then also have 10gbps of services mapped through that port without a CIR, then the service at 1gbps will always have 1gbps available to it, while all of the other traffic will be buffered and delayed in favor of that traffic. Most boxes will not allow you to provision a CIR that is higher than the maximum bandwidth capacity of a given port, though.

Assuming that you are using an Alcatel-Lucent service router in the 7xxx range of products, then the rate is a measurement of maximum kbps. The individual who applied "rate 10000" was probably trying to map the service for 10mbps, not realizing that our world of telecommunications and computing exists in base 16. The true measurement of 10mbps would be 10240kbps.

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