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To: OrionX who wrote (4128)	4/17/1998 9:50:00 PM
From: Mang Cheng	Respond to of 18016

"3Com Prepares to Announce Several WAN Products" (04/17/98; 6:34 p.m. ET) By Jeff Caruso, InternetWeek 3Com on Monday will get all its ducks in a row for network managers interested in merging voice and data on WANs. The company will announce a WAN access switch, resell a WAN switch (from Newbridge Networks) for large enterprises and service providers, and improve and rename its AccessBuilder multiplexers. All the products will be part of the PathBuilder line. "I don't think there are any big pieces missing" from 3Com's product set, said Rosemary Cochran, principal of Vertical Systems Group. What remains to be seen is, how well these products will interoperate with those from other vendors to deliver end-to-end quality-of-service (QoS) guarantees for voice and video, she added. The PathBuilder products, which are designed for the WAN edge, will map LAN-based QoS to WAN-based QoS. The IEEE 802.1p standard and IP precedence bits from the LAN world will map to Priority Frame in frame relay or the appropriate ATM QoS level. 3Com will also add voice compression abilities to the PathBuilder line. "The voice compression is a significant part of the announcement for us," said Jim McLeod, senior systems engineer at Presbyterian Health Care Services. The group is evaluating the PathBuilder S310, S330, and S600 -- the new names for the AccessBuilder 9100, 9300, and 9600, respectively. The organization wants to send voice and data to clinics across the state over the same T1 lines it now uses. To do that, the voice needs to be compressed to make room for the data, McLeod said. The S310, S330, and S600 will be transformed from access multiplexers to switches. 3Com also will introduce a new box, the S700, as a high-end WAN switch. To complete the line, 3Com will resell and support a WAN backbone switch from Newbridge, and call it the PathBuilder S36170. The S36170 has a switch matrix that scales from 1.6 Gps to 12.8 Gbps. It supports speeds ranging from T1 (1.54 Mbps) to OC-12 (622 Mbps) for ATM and frame relay, and includes accounting, provisioning, and WAN management for service providers. The network management software is also produced by Newbridge. Although this end-to-end approach sounds appealing, "I think it's a hard sell," Cochran said. "The fact is that most of these networks are built in pieces." The PathBuilder line will start shipping in June. The S310, S330, and S600 range from $6,000 to $35,000. The S700 starts at $30,000, and the S36170 ranges from $50,000 to $200,000. techweb.com