On Tue, 23 Sep 1997, Alex Rubenstein wrote: ==> ==> WASHINGTON DC NEW YORK CITY ==> ==> ==> | B R I D G E | ==>MAE -- 100 Mb/s -- | Cisco | -DS3- | Cisco | -- FDDI or -- (multiple ==>East FDDI | 4700M | | 4700M | 100Base T peers) ==>giga Switch ==> Yucky. ==>1) Will MFS allow us to connect multiple Peers on the same FDDI port (from ==>thier webpage, it looks like it, but I am not sure). The more germane question here is "will MFS allow us to extend layer 2 across all these devices to provide a multi-access point in NYC?". ==>2) Is there any technical reason that the above is bad? Bridging is signficantly more troublesome to troubleshoot. Additionally, if these providers love layer 2 so much that they connect their "MAE port" into another switch, and have other interconnects using a bridged environment (yes, I've seen it), getting all the parties to cooperate in debugging spanning tree problems can be difficult. Additionally, if the DS3 between Ciscos is done on an ATM card, keep in mind that you'll lose close to 30-35% of your traffic because of the ATM cell tax--you'll probably get a max of 30 Mbps throughput. If it's HSSI/HDLC, you shouldn't have many problems. Also, while translational bridging has been around for a while, you may experience problems from FDDI->FE. ==>3) Because we do it the way shown above, does that make us look less ==>attractive (politically) ? It's a creative solution, I'll give you points for that. /cah