Santa Clara, California-headquartered 3Com Corp has announced its enterprise-wide 100Base-T Fast Ethernet strategy and associated products. The company’s offerings will include Parallel Tasking adaptors, LinkBuilder hubs, NETBuilder II routers, LANplex switches and the SuperStack system, all of which, it says, will be managed by Transcend network management, enabling network managers to focus on managing the logical network regardless of the location of the physical device. The first products to ship will be the 10/100 EISA and Peripheral Component Interconnect bus adaptors, which operate at 10Mbps or 100Mbps. These are intended to eliminate workgroup bottlenecks by moving servers and high-performance personal computers to the SuperStack 100Base-T repeater with optional 10-100 bridge/management unit, says the company. According to 3Com, the 10-100 switching products will increase performance to the installed base and new AT bus personal computers by providing dedicated 10Mbps with a 100Mbps downlink to servers. To connect high-speed workgroups to the collapsed backbone, 3Com says it will provide NETBuilder II and LANplex 6000 interface modules, and a SuperStack 100Base-T switch. The 10/100Base-TX EISA and Peripheral Component Interconnect adaptors will ship in December this year for a price under UKP200. The Stackable 100Base-TX repeater with an optional 10-100 bridge/management unit will ship in spring 1995, as will the 10-100Base-T4 adaptors and SuperStack repeater, which will support 100Base-T over Category 3 unshielded twisted pair cabling. Also due at that time is the 100Base-T NETBuilder II interface module, designed to route between 100Base-T and other technologies, such as Ethernet, Fibre Distributed Data Interface, Asynchronous Transfer Mode and wide area networks. Next summer will see the launch of the SuperStack 10Base-T switch with 100Base-T downlink, together with the SuperStack 100Base-T switch and LANplex 6000 100Base-T interface module. Later in the year 3Com will launch the LinkBuilder MSH 10Base-T with 100Base-T downlink module and the LinkBuilder MSH 100Base-T switch module. Prices will be given nearer the time.
