3Com Corp. will use the ComNet '98 show here next week to wheel out high-speed hubs and switches that offer some of the industry's lowest prices per port.
3Com will not have the lead for long on the hub side, though. Bay Networks, Inc. soon will announce new products with bargain basement prices (see story).
At ComNet, 3Com is expected to announce a higher density version of the company's Gigabit Ethernet switch, the SuperStack II Switch 9000 SX. The new product, called the SuperStack II Switch 9300, has 12 ports vs. the 9000's eight.
The 9300 is a wiring closet device designed to aggregate traffic from existing Fast Ethernet and Ethernet workgroups and server farms equipped with Gigabit Ethernet uplinks. In a typical network configuration, the 9300 would be used to connect these workgroups to a 3Com Core-Builder 9000 Layer 3 Gigabit Ethernet switch in a center. The 9300 is part of a product rollout that will see 3Com drop the price of a Gigabit Ethernet port to $1,249 - half the port price of the SuperStack II Switch 9000. Prices for 10/100 autosensing ports will drop to $175 per port, just slightly above Cisco Systems, Inc.'s $167 per-port pricing for the recently an-nounced 24-port 2924 XL switch (NW, Jan. 12, page 14).
The pricing is "pretty amazing," said Eric Hindin, program director at market research firm The Yankee Group, in Boston.
"It is really aggressive; I certainly didn't expect it to fall to that point," said another analyst, who requested anonymity.
3Com also will unveil the SuperStack II Switch 3900, which supports from 24 to 36 ports of 10M/100M bit/sec autosensing Ethernet and an integrated Gigabit Ethernet port. The 3900 also has an expansion slot that enables the device to house two additional Gigabit Ethernet ports.
Lastly, 3Com is introducing a SuperStack II Dual Speed 10/100 hub for $79 per port. 3Com's current 12- and 24-port Dual Speed hubs are priced from $175 to $200 per port.
3Com will soon be leapfrogged, though, because Bay is expected to announce its first 10/100 hub, the BayStack 250. It will feature 24 ports at $75 per port and will ship in March.
Cisco offers 100Base-T hubs for $87 per port.
And in the WAN
3Com also will use the ComNet 98 show to reveal how the company will evolve its Total Control remote access concentrator into a high-horsepower multiservice access switch for carriers.Over the course of the year, 3Com will upgrade the 16-slot chassis to support IP voice, video and fax. Today it supports only data. In addition, new modules will support high-bandwidth access, including broadband cable modems and digital subscriber line technologies, as well as dial-up. The IP voice capability will be introduced next week.
The new capabilities are made possible by incorporating 3Com's EdgeServer Pro and HiPer Digital Signal Processing modules, which were introduced last year. Together, they can handle call setup and control, as well as intensive packet processing.
Next year, 3Com plans to upgrade the Total Control chassis itself, fitting it with Signaling System 7 (SS7) software, the signaling protocol used in telephone networks.
With phone network signaling capabilities, Total Control could act as a front end to larger, more expensive, switches, directing traffic at the edge of the network to voice or data switches. For example, calls to Internet service providers might be identified and trunked to IP switches within the carrier network.
3Com is already working in conjunction with telephone switch maker Siemens AG and ATM switch maker Newbridge Networks Corp. on a way to guarantee quality of service across ATM networks, starting at the network interface card of a PC. Siemens is part of the effort to put SS7 on the Total Control chassis.
