UUNET beefs up backbone at Ciscos expense.
Lifted from the Ascend thread
To: brian z (2907 )
From: Dee Jay Apr 27 1997 1:23PM EST
Reply #2911 of 2917
speaking of CSCO, ASND's GRF beats out Cisco routers for UUNET:
(excerpted from SFGATE site) note: paragraphs reshuffled to emphasize the importance of the purchase vis a vis Cisco.
"Internet order bolsters Ascend
FROM EXAMINER STAFF AND WIRE REPORTS Bloomberg
News contributed to this report.
[04-25]
UUNET Technologies Inc. said Friday it's continuing to beef up its piece of the Internet's main arteries with a major equipment purchase from Alameda-based Ascend Communications.
The sale to UUNET is an important boost to Ascend's efforts to be a competitive producer of data routers. Cisco Systems Inc. now dominates that market with an estimated 80 percent share.
The switch equipment in the deal reported Friday, called GRF - which networking industry wags say stands for ``Goes Real Fast'' - is Ascend's first effort to enter the highly profitable routing market, worth $6.5 billion this year according to market researchers the Dell'Oro Group.
UUNET is buying 20 big, cutting-edge switches from Ascend. The price of the switches were not disclosed. The switches regulate the flow of data along the high-capacity lines operated by backbone companies. UUNET said it's changing its policy of relying on Cisco routers because the Ascend product can send data at four times the speed of a large Cisco 7500 router, the fastest product Cisco sells.
``The GRF is better, faster, and cheaper than a Cisco 7500,'' said James McManus, Vice President for Systems Engineering at UUNET.
Peter Swartz, an analyst at Salomon Brothers, said UUNET's purchases were an important endorsement for the Ascend product, as well as evidence that the GRF will interconnect well with the Cisco routers that dominate Internet traffic today.
Ascend should sell $70 million worth of GRF products in this calendar year, he said. He added that GRF should provide the company about 15 percent of its revenue this year.
The purchase is part of a big UUNET network-investment program - provoking protests from a San Francisco Internet service provider, according to an on-line report. UUNET plans to pass along some of the expansion costs by starting to charge ISPs tens of thousands of dollars a month for Net connections that have always been free.
UUNET is one of several companies that operate big pieces of the Internet's so-called backbone, onto which local networks hook up.
A subsidiary of WorldCom Inc., UUNET said it is the world's largest seller of Internet access, accounting for 35 percent to 40 percent of U.S. data traffic on the Net. The company is spending $1 million a day building up its network to handle the exploding growth of traffic in
the U.S.
UUNET now seems to be trying to pass costs of such investments along to Internet service providers, many of which presumably would just keep passing them along to customers.
Interactive Week reported on-line Thursday that UUNET has told 12 providers that as of May and June they will no longer benefit from the so-called peering agreements that have given them free hookups to the Net.
Noting that UUNET has poured hundreds of millions of dollars into new equipment, the company said the free ride would continue only for ISPs that have made similar investments.
c 1997 San Francisco Examiner" |
