Interest in Metropolitan Area Networks, the high-speed local-wide area network hybrid has reached the point were there is an actual market for terminal adaptors, according to Santa Barbara, California-based Multiaccess Computing Corp, which has perhaps surprisingly decided to tackle the Macintosh market first. It has also eschewed the more conventional method of using a router or bridge to connect a local net segment to the metropolitan network in favour of a direct-attach card. Consequently, it last week announced that the MCC-1000 SMDSTalk NuBus card is now available for connection to the IEEE 802.6 SMDS Metropolitan Area Network. With the SMDSTalk enhancement, a local net need no longer be confined to an office building. Acting like an Ethernet adaptor, the MCC-1000 communicates directly with a metropolitan area network via the Switched Multi-megabit Data Service link between the telephone exchange and an individual Macintosh workstation. The company claims that all applications operating over AppleTalk networks will work transparently across the wide area network. Switched Multi-megabit Data Service is the name used generally in the US for a high-speed public overlay data network that conforms to the IEEE 802.6 networking standard using dual queue, dual bus technology. Two advantages are claimed for using an a direct adaptor rather than a router. The first is tighter coupling between the metropolitan area network to applications, resulting in improved response times. The second plus point is price – the single-quantity cost for the board is $3,000, whereas separate routers and bridges are running in the over-$12,000 range. The MCC-1000 is a single board communications controller occupying one NuBus input-output slot on the Mac II system board.
