Cost for Gigabit Ethernet or 2 Gbit Fibre Channel Circuits

depends on their pricing policy, and how much it costs to build / operate.

a lot of this is dependent on how long the link will be, whether the carrier has a fairly direct duct / fibre route (since you will want low latency for fibre channel) and whether the sites need a dig to get into.

generally Ethernet seems easier to build over a long haul link, since they can push it over SDH, MPLS etc.

f/channel applications tend to be very sensitive to latency, so ask for what your link is going to give you before you order it.

Because of latency you may get an unpleasant surprise about how much of the WAN bandwidth is useful to an individual application - F/channel switches with lots of buffers may help.

the Adva kit i worked with would use the same card type for any single channel link between 100 Mbps and 2.4 Gbps, so if the route is "pure" metro, either type would cost the same (but that is discussing the price of building the kit, not what you get charged). If you need multiple links, then a different card type can do 1 * 4G, 2 *

you can get 4G and 10G capable f/channel switches now - the faster links across the WAN may be useful. >