Santa Clara, California-based 3Com Corp has extended its remote office internetworking bridge-router system, the NETBuilder Remote Office, to support central as well as remote site capabilities. The move is an attempt to make 3Com’s Boundary Routing system affordable to a wider pool of users. Formerly, 3Com offered central site Boundary Routing system support exclusively through its high performance NETBuilder II router. According to the company, the NETBuilder Remote Office 227 model will now support three to 10 nodes of a Boundary Routing system by acting as the central site node. This will extend the reduced administration, capital and wide area network service costs of the Boundary Routing system to users with smaller corporate networks at multiple sites, says the company. 3Com claims that using the NETBuilder Remote Office 227 for the Boundary Routing system central node instead of NETBuilder II can reduce costs by more than 70%. The NETBuilder Remote Office family of products is available at prices starting below $2,000. Central site support of the Boundary Routing system by the NETBuilder Remote Office family will be out during the first quarter of 1995.
