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Technology Stocks : COMS & the Ghost of USRX w/ other STUFF -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Scrapps who wrote (13279)	3/3/1998 11:27:00 AM
From: Moonray	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 22053

GIVE ME SOME NEWS! o~~~ O

To: Scrapps who wrote (13279)	3/3/1998 12:24:00 PM
From: Moonray	Respond to of 22053

Use Gigabit Ethernet For Cost-effective Networks - 3Com Newsbytes - March 03, 1998 10:37 MANILA, PHILIPPINES, 1998 MAR 3 (NB) -- Metropolitan Computer Times. Standing pat on its credo "Switch where you can, route where you must," 3Com Corporation [NASDAQ:COMS] is warning competitors "to keep the religion out of the customers" in terms of their approach to adapting network "solutions." "Use the right tool for the right job. Keep the religion out of customers," asserted Steve Jumonville, Computing Systems consultant and international resource for 3Com, who recently visited the Philippines. The executive said that, while the pricey asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) switches are necessary for highly critical applications like those of trading floors and hospitals, companies that have a need for high-speed connectivity but whose applications are not as mission- critical as the ones cited earlier, can turn to the "simple, cost- effective Gigabit Ethernet." The executive further underscored that, in using ATM switches, users get to pay more and get half the speed provided by Gigabit Ethernet. "Gigabit Ethernet provides the lowest price per application at $2/megabit-per-second (Mbps) compared to ATM's $8/Mbps," Jumonville told members of the press in a briefing attended by Newsbytes. 3Com will also start shipping new Gigabit Ethernet products that would bring the cost per application further down to $1.2/Mbps, Newsbytes learned. While the new technology has a set of limitations compared to ATM, which can handle both video and voice, in addition to text, Jumonville cited a Dataquest report estimating that around 50% of all new backbones would be Gigabit Ethernet. The executive further believes that ATM and Gigabit Ethernet will co-exist for a long time at the backbone. More precisely, the executive said he sees the ATM staying at the enterprise wide area network (WAN) and that Gigabit Ethernet will stay in the campus. While among the early, if not the earliest, vendors to introduce Layer 3 (L3) switches in the market back in 1992, Jumonville, who has worked for Hewlett-Packard before moving on to 3Com, said L3 switching is all about "routers." "Routing is expensive and slow. What we're seeing now are third- generation L3 switches, like 3Com's SuperStack II Switch 9300, that are capable of switching four to 50 million packets per second (pps)," he said. He also said that today's network backbone is not just concerned about IP (Internet Protocol) or IPX (Internetwork Packet Exchange) in as much as it is concerned about policies and traffic prioritization. In line with this, Jumonville commented on Cisco's position in the enterprise backbone arena. "Cisco no longer has an effective solution for the enterprise backbone since it has yet no L3 announcement," he declared. He also criticized Cisco and Bay Networks' move to acquire Kalpana and Rapid City, respectively, to square off 3Com's advances in switching technology. The trouble with the big boys acquiring these "young, hot kids" is that they lack an in-house development capability, according to Jumonville. As for IP-only switches, Jumonville said that 80% of the companies that he has done consultancy work with, still has IPX running, hence, these companies will automatically rule out a switch that can accommodate only one protocol. This does not mean, however, that 3Com is underestimating the rapid growth of IP traffic in a network. "If Bay Networks says 70% of the network traffic is IP, that's a pretty credible figure. We believe them, but we also believe that IPX and AppleTalk will be around for a long while," he said. Reported by Newsbytes News Network: newsbytes.com. o~~~ O