Cisco's token effort

I have to admit that I have never been a fan of 100M bit/sec Token Ring. It just never made any sense. But, once vendors seemed to back it, we all assumed the thing would actually come to market - and with a standard behind it.

But, alas, we were wrong. In a classic "pulling the rug from under the competition" move, Cisco has abandoned this emerging standard like a discarded token. Citing a lack of market for this product, Cisco has reneged on their original commitment and decided it will pursue this in the future only if a market materializes.

Guess what? It won't. There will be no sizable market for 100M bit/sec Token Ring. But not because it never should have been conceived in the first place. No. In this case it won't ever materialize because Cisco has pulled out so quickly that if anybody ever tries to re-start the 100M bit/sec Token-Ring drive, they will undoubtedly get that infamous "this machine may have been improperly shut down last time" message.

Still, the whole high-speed token ring thing should never have gotten this far to begin with. There simply isn't that much of a market to warrant a high-level of spending on the part of the major vendors.

Token Ring has lost the battle with Ethernet. There is no reason to revisit that decision with a rematch between Fast Ethernet and 100M bit/sec Token Ring. Token Ring will always cost more than Ethernet. And why invest in a backbone technology that is designed to support ONLY a dying market?

The advent of Token-Ring switches took soooo long that most major users have already begun their transition strategies to Ethernet, Fast Ethernet, Gigabit Ethernet or ATM (if not at the desktop, then certainly in the backbone).

Finally, the backbone network decision is going to be influenced and dominated by the major backbone vendor. In this case that would be Cisco. And Cisco already has a fine backbone infrastructure (not the best technically, but the best from a market domination perspective).

By default, Cisco will control the uplink into the backbone. Cisco is not a Token-Ring shop, so why in the world would anybody want high-speed Token-Ring uplink technology? Instead, Cisco will provide its own Token-Ring/Fast Ethernet translation for those users that need it. And guess what? It works.

This is not to say that the market for Token-Ring switches is completely dead. Far from it. Although the market was under $150M worldwide in 1997, we expect it to accelerate rapidly in the second half of 1998 as many smaller Token-Ring shops begin to move to low-cost switches ($200 to $300 a port) to upgrade their aging LANs.

But look for Token Ring to really take off when Cisco (through their co-development partnership with Olicom) aggressively goes after conservative corporate America with switching products that link all those low-powered Token-Ring LANs to Fast and even Gigabit Ethernet backbones.

So why did Cisco get involved in the High-Speed Token Ring effort in the first place? If the Cisco kids knew that they were going to be driving the market towards a non-Token-Ring implementation at the center of the network (and they did), they should have stayed home. The problem is that they could have made the market happen - and until last week it looked like that was just what they would do. A Cisco 100M bit/sec Token-Ring interface would have opened the gates to smaller vendors in the "Cisco compliant" market.

Instead, they pulled out. So even though Cisco is not the leading seller of Token-Ring switches, their sheer overall size makes them dominant (sort of like Microsoft). So while the little guys will continue to sell their basic token-ring switches, I'd start thinking about that Fast Ethernet or ATM uplink real soon.