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Technology Stocks : LAST MILE TECHNOLOGIES - Let's Discuss Them Here -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: MikeM54321 who wrote (1924)	8/19/1998 8:25:00 AM
From: Frank A. Coluccio	Respond to of 12823

Hi Mike, Ken, >>Also, what is a "gigabit switch router?" Is it a router or a switch? And what's about the "gigabit" part? I usually associate gigabit with gigabit ethernet(GE). I'm fairly certain AOL's backbone has nothing to do with GE. Sounds like a lot of marketing buzzwords were chosen.<< You're right about one thing, and that is the marketing aspect of the whole affair. Not to say that they wont achieve this, but it's still a work in progress in many ways. The new product rollout motif today (or maybe it's not really all that new) is for vendors to create an ideal, or a design in principle, publish it in the way of a feature set, label it with a model number, and then proceed to build it to "specifications." And it's something that usually works well over time, given sufficient time, come hell or high water. The Gigabit aspect thus far has referred to the aggregate processing capabilities, usually as a function of total port I/O line rates, and backplane processing speeds, but will over time relate to actual individual port carrying capabilities. But today with WDM/DWDM beginning to have an influence in such metrics, I'm not so sure what the criteria are any more for making these claims. It's my understanding that the GSR is only now finding it's way to OC-48 capabilities, or 2.5 Gb/s, but just what that means is something I'm still trying to decipher. >> Notice the term "switch router." It's confusing.<< That is the subject that has kept an army of consultants, pundits and erstwhile unemployed authors in paychecks, now, for about two years. I can point you to the marketechture sources and to some legitimate articles on the subject that attempt to lift the cloud off of this seeming enigma, if you desire. One of the problems is that it is a moving target that shifts between layers of the OSI Reference Model with each turn of the calendar pages, and from one vendor to the next. Suffice it to say here that it simply refers to an intelligent, table-based application of path-finding instructions, whereby silicon (switching) now does what was once done through reading and executing software tables (routing). HTH, and Regards, Frank C.