Santa Clara, California-headquartered 3Com Corp has launched what are said to be the industry’s first single-board routers, which it says means that they are able to be manufactured on the same production lines as its EtherLink and TokenLink adaptor boards: the economies of scale this enables have reduced overhead costs – and therefore end-user prices – says 3Com, making it possible for the company to sell them for less than $2,000. Aimed primarily at small- to medium-sized remote sites, the products will encompass both Ethernet and Token Ring local networking protocols, as well as ISDN Basic Rate Interface. According to the company, they can be used either as conventional routers linking one local area network to three wide area networks, or to provide disaster recovery through a feature that enables the system to dial up the remote site if the primary line fails, obviating the need for two lines. The products provide Frame Relay, ISDN, Point-to-Point Protocol and X25 wide area support, and AppleTalk, DECnet, Internet Protocol, IPX, Open Systems Interconnection, Vines IP and Xerox Network System protocol support. On the wide area network service side, dial on demand for IP and IPX protocols is available, together with boundary routing over Frame Relay, smart filters to control wide area network usage, and bandwidth on demand for boundary routing. The products also feature dual-image Flash memory, which 3Com claims will enable users to write new software versions to a test area separate from the location where the production software operates. According to the company, this will protect it from possible corruption or erroneous parameter settings when software is updated over a wide area link. Prices for the products, which are shipping now, start at $1,800 for the Remote Office 200 featuring integrated 10Base-T and wide area network connectors, and $2,000 for the 201, offering Point-to-Point Protocol and Frame Relay support. Remote Office will feature boundary routing over X25 next quarter.
