ATM Announcement
NET To Enter ATM WAN Race
(1/29/97; 11:45 a.m. EST)
By Jeff Caruso, CommunicationsWeek
Network Equipment Technologies will finally introduce its first ATM WAN products at next week's ComNet show in Washington, D.C.
NET, Redwood City, Calif., said it plans to introduce two carrier ATM switches and also to help its installed base of time-division multiplexing (TDM) equipment users start to take advantage of carrier ATM services by introducing an ATM module for its IDNX multiplexer.
Users are likely to start mixing voice and frame relay over ATM services, because ATM has more predictable delay characteristics, said Tom Jones, partner at New Venture Directions, Charlottesville, Va. "It's better for delay-sensitive traffic like voice," he said.
The new switch products will straddle the edge of a carrier's WAN, and NET officials said they plan to add support for Ipsilon's IP Switching later this year. Although NET introduced a campus ATM product several years ago, the company soon after changed its focus to the WAN and stopped selling the LAN product, officials said.
The CellXpress module will be able to perform interworking between ATM and other technologies supported by the IDNX, such as frame relay, voice and LAN traffic. The module is expected to ship in the third quarter of this year, costing $15,000 for T1/E1 trunks.
NET's ATM edge switch for carriers also will ship in the third quarter, starting at about $80,000. The Promina 4000 supports up to 16 cards, each of which contains a 622-megabit-per-second switch. NET will ship an ATM network multiplexer for carriers in the second quarter for about $60,000. The Promina 2000 contains a 3-gigabit-per-second switching fabric and could be used to feed voice, video and data to a Promina 4000 switch.
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