Folks, As you all know, from the past two NANOG meetings, Pacific Bell has been working on identifying and evaluating a new ATM switch architecture for the NAP. After looking at several alternatives, I am pleased to announce that we have decided to deploy Stratacom BPX switches. We are very confident that this decision will greatly increase the throughput perfomance of traffic over our ATM environment for the NAP. The performance issues that we have presented have fallen into two categories: buffering capacity and backplane speed. The BPX's buffering is amongst the largest available with a 64,000 cell buffering capacity per port. It also has a 9.6 Gigabit per second backplane. Our engineering group has worked extremely hard in testing the performance of the switch in a TCP/IP environment, with several rigorous test plans. The Stratacom's performance was very impressive. At our next customer meeting and at the next NANOG, we will present a detailed analysis of the results of our testing and of the capabilities of the new switches. This new switch architecture will also allow us to offer a solid OC3 access to the NAP. Along with the new switch announcement, I would also like to inform you of our plans to add an additional exchange point in Southern California. This effort is targetted to those providers who foresee their traffic needs exceeding DS3 access and would be available to both OC3 and DS3 customers. The exact location and timing has yet to be determined. More to follow, most likely at the next NANOG. Warren ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Warren K. Williams, Director - Network Access Point Pacific Bell Business Communications Services Email: wkwilli@pacbell.com Phone: 510.867.9065 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------