Jacomo Corp, a new company in Independence, Missouri with Dr Roger Billings as its chairman, is making bold claims for a new technology, which it says can be used over existing Ethernet and Token Ring networks. Dr Billings is the man who claims a patent on the concept of client-server computing and is in litigation with Novell Inc over it. Jacamo is offering what it calls WideBand Network Adapters that operate at 330Mbps and offer a useful data throughput of 264Mbps. WideBand operates in a Parallel Packet protocol that is claimed to increase the useful throughput of the system as much as one to two orders of magnitude in applications such as video conferencing and loading executable files at workstations. WideBand adaptors are at the prototype stage and beta test units are expected for shipment by summer. The product installs over an existing local area network based on either Ethernet or Token Ring and can be installed incrementally, user by user. It is claimed to overcome the delays caused by packet collisions and server bottlenecks, so that not only does it deliver true 264Mbps, but in a video-conferencing installation with 10 users connected, it out-performs its specification, givoing results comparable to a system operating at over 2Gbps, Jacomo says.
Separate cable
WideBand essentially provides a one-directional connection from the server to users, for those applications that do not require two-way traffic, and uses a separate cable from the local net: with Category 5 twisted pair, it uses the spare conductors on the existing cable, while with fibre and coaxial cable, duplicate networks must be installed – although Dr Billings says that fortunately, many people ran double when their networks were put in place. At the heart of the technology is the premise that with many applications – notably videoconferencing – the same data is needed by all participating users: the system reduces traffic by sending a single data packet parallel to all appropriate users of the system. According to Dr Billings, videoconferences of 600 people are possible with the technology. It also has a security system that uses a proprietary technology that is claimed to prevent a user’s password from ever being sent over the network, even in encrypted form. The secured data is requested by user name and the server retrieves the user’s password from its own database and encrypts the data before transmission over WideBand. If the requester is not the designated user, the data cannot be decrypted at the workstation. We want WideBand to be as popular as Ethernet, Dr Billings says, and to that end, Jacomo is planning to license it at a very low rate, and is also offering the chip set for people who want to get into it quickly. In the US, the products will be sold through distributors and also direct for large accounts, while internationally, the company says it is planning to establish a single Master Distributor in each country, to ensure that users will get adequate support.
