Despite the fact that Cabletron Corp did the same thing only two weeks ago, Codenoll Technology Inc has just announced the first Fibre Distributed Data Interface board for the Macintosh. To be fair to the Boston-based company, Codenoll says that its CodeNet range of copper boards will begin shipping in just 30 days while Cabletron said at the beginning of August that its product would be shipping in 90 days. The company has three strings to its bow: the 9550 is a single attach adaptor costing $4,000 that is connected via a multimode fibre optical link of up to 6,000 feet to any industry-standard FDDI concentrator. The 9553 costs $5,000 and it is a dual attach board that connects directly to the counter-rotating FDDI ring. Finally, there is the 9750, an SDDI NuBus which sends FDDI traffic over existing shielded twisted pair and supports lengths of up to 300 feet. All the boards are full size NuBus busmastered 100Mbps FDDI adaptor boards, with a Motorola 68020 processor on board. In a NuBus-90 system, the board automatically uses the enhanced data transfer capabilities. Both products include the FDDI Station Management protocol, SMT, and SNMP agents, implementing both mandatory and optional functions. Apart from standard network management applications, the ring can be controlled on the Mac via a System 7 Control Panel. Recognising that the SMT standard is stil likely to evolve, Codenoll have stuck the the SMT code in Flash ROM. With the 9750, Codenall has decided to go with the IBM-backed SDDI implementation of FDDI over copper rather than the ANSI commitee’s favoured CDDI, which runs over either twisted or untwisted shielded pair. Either way, international sales director Dutt Bulusu is not particularly enamoured with copper, arguing that it it sacifices the security of fibre and saying that the 9750 is really only targeted at installations with a large copper investment. Others in the industry argue that FDDI over copper will bring prices down as expensive opto-electronic technology is made unnecessary. But Bulusu, working for a firm with a large stake in optical FDDI, sees this as a mistake. He claims the only reason optical kit is so expensive is that the market hasn’t grown enough for manufacturing economies of scale to come into play. Yes, he says, FDDI prices will fall over the next year, but no – this will not be due primarily to competition from copper, but rather to increasing shipments of fibre. Regardless of the cause, both Bulusu and those in the CDDI camp predict the same thing – that users will see FDDI adaptor prices fall substantially. Meanwhile Codenoll is selling its SDDI board for $3,500, more expensive than the equivalent fibre board – illustrating that it is always possible to sell copper for more than its fibre equivalent.
