Northern Telecom Ltd has announced a number of enhancements to its Meridian Lanstar PC high-speed local area network for IBM Personalikes. Meridian Lanstar PC is now offered as a discrete local network serving from 32 to 1,344 computers connected by standard telephone wiring, which the company claims is cheaper than other local area networking companies’ methods. It offers 40Mbits-per-second of shared bandwidth and transmits data at 2.56Mbits-per-second. Personal Computers can be located up to 2,000 feet from the packet transport hub which now comes in two sizes. A new single-shelf cabinet serves up to 112 nodes and the standard three-shelf cabinet supports 336 nodes. Up to four cabinets can be linked as a single local network. Meridian Lanstar PC is available immediately in the US, and costs between $750 and $900 per node depending on configuration. The small cabinets will be available in August.