Westlake Village, California-based Franklin Telecommunications Corp has announced a 155Mbps local area network technology, for which it is claiming significant price and performance advantages over existing standards-based systems. Called Hurricane/155, the technology is centred on a Differential Code Modulation system, said to provide performance advantages over Fast Ethernet and 100VG-AnyLAN. Whereas the two standards-based technologies transmit data in 1,000byte chunks, Hurricane transmits 16,000 bytes at a time – significantly reducing network overhead, says Franklin’s vice-president of engineering, John Costello. Local network emulation and packet burst features are also said to be fully implemented in hardware, also reducing processing overhead and network delay. Another significant advantage claimed for the technology – which can be used over users’ existing Category 3 or 5 unshielded twisted pair – is that it does not require a concentrator or hub port for every workstation: rather each Network Interface Card incorporates a built-in hub port enabling users to daisychain workstations, says the company. Costello conceded that for large enterprise networks, other solutions – for example Fibre Distributed Data Interface – may prove more suitable. Costello said that the company is pitching the system specifically at bandwidth-intensive workgroup applications, such as imaging and video. In terms of products, the company is launching network interface boards in AT, EISA, Video Electronics Standards Association, and Peripheral Component Interconnect formats, with prices ranging from $300 to $500; and hubs and concentrators in either eight-port or 22-port rack mountable formats. Each port is said to provide support for up to 20 interconnected workstations at a maximum distance of 300 feet. No specific pricing is available, but it is due to start at less than $2,000, says the company. All the products are shipping in limited quantities immediately. The company is not planning to submit its technology to any standards bodies for consideration of a standard. According to Costello, this is because Franklin feels it does not have the clout needed for it to have a realistic chance of succeeding. Instead, it hopes to license it to other manufacturers. To this end, Costello said the company is in negotiations with other vendors, although he would not be drawn on who these might be.
