General Motors Corp’s Hughes LAN Systems unit in Mountain View, California has launched the first Token Ring product line for the its enterprise hub. Also, the company has bitten the bullet and abandoned the asynchronous backbone in the hub in favour of a 1.6Gbps Asynchronous Transfer Mode backbone, which will be used both for internal bridging of different access modules and for connection to Asynchronous Transfer Mode-to-the desk modules, which are due in the last quarter of next year. The company’s original strategy was to build both an asynchronous bus and an Asynchronous Transfer Mode bus into the same chassis and then migrate from the one to the other. Now it says that it makes economic sense to jump straight to Asynchronous Transfer Mode. The Token Ring family includes a 4Mbps or 16Mbps concentrator module for shielded twisted pair and level 4 or 5 unshielded twisted pair cable plants; a low-cost Lobe Expansion module; repeated fibre and STP Ring-In/Ring-Out capability; and multiport bridge-routers. Each of the modules has built-in network management running on an Intel Corp 80960 RISC chip. Over the next year, all agents will be upgraded to support the emerging SNMP-2 standard. Hughes also announced a RISC-based, 4Mbps or 16Mbps, Token Ring bridge module that supports three Token Ring backplane connections and a fourth port which can either connect an additional backplane ring or an external ring. It says it will be upgradable to a router via new software.
