I mentioned already in an earlier email that 802.17 should be complementary to 802.3. They would fit very well together. For myself, I also firmly believe that 802.17 will play a major role in other areas than in pure telecommunication areas. In principle, in any network where resilience and QoS plays a dominant role. I am convinced that for many manufactures this will be a huge and interesting market without any competition to 802.3 and without reaching the yearly quantities of 802.3.
SANs are certainly a very interesting application for RPRs.
If it is replaced by anything it will be wireless. So let's focus RPR on a problem space that we know exists and can be bound. Any effort to replace 802.3 with 802.17 would be met with huge opposition. Token Ring was a huge success, not matter how you look at it. We should all hope that .17 is that successful.