On Thursday, April 24, 1997 6:36 PM, Deepak Jain [SMTP:deepak@jain.com] wrote:

(I do not know if this is true, but it is a guess). That the Netstar product did the ATM routing extremely well. I believe that was its market originally.. All of the other cards, the ether, the new T1 line cards (hah-hah) maybe even the HSSI cards are all new since Ascend took them over, to broaden their market.

As an almost customer of Netstar, and a long time one from Ascend, I have watched the product get integrated into what it is today. The original point of these boxes was HIPPI. HIPPI over WAN. Hmm. Well, "I have no supercomputers", as they say - so I waited for other cards. When Netstar was acquired I remember that the cards available were HIPPI, HSSI, FDDI and ATM. Ethernet was on the way (100Mb was talked about, then switchable down to 10Mb) by end of 1996. The interesting products now are the IP/SONET OC3c card and the OC12 card that should turn up one day. The attraction to us for buying this product is the BSDi OS used at the management controller. We have somewhat unusual requirements, including our own internal protocol for dynamic routing of dialups, and the availability of the BSDi environment behind Ascends new CLI makes this one of the few real routers that works off the shelf. We currently have one in house, and once some SNMP issues are fixed we will be able to complete testing and then maybe buy some. As to who is using them in a production environment, I understand from colleagues that a recent "supercore" upgrade that PSI did in NY (where we peer with them) was to roll out one or more GRF's. This is of course unconfirmed rumour until someone from PSInet speaks up. Regards, -- Peter Galbavy Demon Internet Ltd http://www.demon.net/