After nine months of ‘behind the curtain’ negotiations, Mountain View, California-headquartered Hughes LAN Systems Inc and Wellfleet Communications Inc, Billerica, Massachusetts have agreed to joint development of hub products that integrate Wellfleet routing, switching and Asynchronous Transfer Mode technologies into Hughes Enterprise Hubs. Wellfleet will develop router modules for the Hughes Enterprise Hub that will support high performance Ethernet, Token Ring, FDDI and wide area interfaces. According to Wellfleet, the development work will entail taking its standard product and building it to Hughes’sboard format, using a Flash memory card that runs Wellfleet’s own software rather than building a special product in software terms. For its part, Hughes, ultimately owned by General Motors Corp, will contribute a new Asynchronous Transfer Mode access module that connects the new routing modules to the Enterprise Hub backplane or external Asynchronous Transfer Mode switches. By integrating their technologies, the companies say they will improve the performance of collapsed backbone networks: the hub will aggregate multiple local network segments at the wiring closet and feed routed traffic to Wellfleet backbone routers or Asynchronous Transfer Mode switches, such as Wellfleet’s planned Asynchronous Transfer Mode Router-Switch, thereby reducing the amount of traffic between them. The products are due to ship in mid-1994. Hughes has also entered into a reseller agreement to offer Wellfleet’s routers to its customers, and the two companies will be implementing a United Support Agreement covering technical support and service for both integrated and stand-alone routers.
