These are some notes that I made as I was preparing my presentation for the RegTechs meeting in San Diego Jan31/Feb 1. I have revised them (some what) in light of some of the conversations & presentations made at the RegTechs meeting. There are undoubtably holes & inaccuracies in these notes; please correct any that you see. --asp@uunet.uu.net (Andrew Partan) MAE-East status MAE-East is a 10 Meg 'ethernet' made up of 3 rings: - Sprint POP to Boone Blvd - College Park/ESnet to Boone Blvd - College Park/NSFNET, MCI POP, WilTel POP, Union Station, and Boone Blvd Each ring is made up of 10 Meg slices of a T3 and learning filtering bridges. The 3 rings are joined together at Boone Blvd with a small ethernet. MAE-East is getting pretty loaded and something needs to be done to increase the bandwidth. Work is proceeding on several fronts to get this done. The most popular option seems to be splitting the rings up into smaller point-to-point links and joining them with a ethernet switch (like a Kalpana box) at Boone Blvd. Other options are doing some sort of ATM switch in the middle, or switching to higher speed ATM, SMDS, or FDDI. There are some folks working on getting firm pricing for these options. [Note: This last week there has been some more work done w/ MFS to get the current technology to work a bit better. Some of the rings have been shifted about a bit (I think that the PSI sites are now on the same ring as ESnet). There is more being done and things are shifting fast enough that this will probably be out of date by the time you read it.]