San Jose-based 3Com Corp continues to release a steady flow of products that conform to its Scalable Internetworking theme. The latest are the Linkbuilder 10BT and 10BTi stackable hubs 12-port repeaters that can be joined together in groups of up to four, giving what to the network looks like a single 48-port repeater. The trick the company has employed involves a special cable that can link the separate repeaters as would a backplane. Linking them together in this way avoids the maximum number of repeaters problem of Ethernet and also means the customer does not haveto worry about going for a cheap repeater and risk having to throw it away later in favour of a chassis-based box. The 10BT works out at UKP66 per port, while the 10BTi costs UKP122 per port. The difference between the two is that when complete, the more expensive box contains an SNMP management agent. One 10BTi connected to three standard 10BTs can manage the whole cluster, but sadly, the cheaper hub cannot be upgraded to the intelligent one.
