After searching through this newsgroup for a while, I realize this subject has been beat to death, but I have a little more specific question....
My company is building out our network inside the NY/NJ metro area. We are going to be offering Ethernet over Copper, among other services. Since we will be collocated in one of the main hotels in NYC we can get IP pretty cheap.
We were planning on putting in a Catalyst 3550 to do all the switching and VLANing for our clients (at least for now). We will have an uplink connected to our upstream carrier at 100mbps (again to start out with), and will be delivering the clients 10mbps chunks.
As I said before, we can get the IP pretty cheap inside our Colo, so we are planing to expand to about 2 or 3 upstream providers within the next couple months.
We want to be able to get our own IP Blocks from ARIN (which we have already requested), and broadcast that out to our upstream providers so we can assign our clients those IP's. Also, we want to be able to accept and pass along BGP broadcasts from our clients.
Is this too much for the Catalyst 3550 (running SMI but I don't think that makes a difference)? Should we put in a router between our 3550 and the upstream provider?
We are probably going to put in a bandwidth shaper (netequalizer.com) in between the 3550 and our upstream provider to limit bandwidth on the VLANs, but if we need to put a router in, we can put that between the
3550 and the router if necessary.