*cough* *cough* Hate to jump into the middle of this wonderful debate, but has anyone here been able to push more than 60-70mbs through the fddi interfaces in the NetEdges anyhow? We've upgraded to an oc3c line to MAE-West, and discoverd that lo and behold, you don't get that much more out of the link than you did with a DS3 because the fddi cards top off not much farther up. Full duplex is a nice thought, and would win us another 5-10mbs, but since we are far and away a content provider (traffic ratio outbound to inbound is close to 10:1 at MAE-West), what we're concerned about is being able to deliver the content people are asking for. Opening up the back channel from shared to full FDDI is a, well, "nice" feature, but isn't nearly as attractive as getting better FDDI cards for the NetEdges.
Well, order two FDDI ports at MAE-West, each into a router which has two T3s back to your data center. Each two T3s should be able to do 90mbits/sec of hdlc or ppp framing back to you, and route back and forth from the FDDI. Or order an OC3 'WAN' link, but plug it into an AIP card in a 75xx and pull 3 T3s back to your main site. Can a Cisco AIP speak ATM to the wan port of a Gigaswitch?
Matt Petach Network Engineer, InterNex (working from home)
Avi