Pacific Telesis Group Inc’s Pacific Bell Inc has teamed with GTE Corp to test SMDS, Switched Multimegabit Data Services, between local telephone exchange companies, and Rockwell International Corp, which has facilities in both companies’ territories, is serving as the test customer: the test network will interconnect several Ethernet local area networks using Sun Microsystems Inc workstations at Rockwell’s Rocketdyne division facility at Canoga Park, which is in Pacific Bell’s territory, and a Cray Research Inc supercomputer located at the Rockwell’s Information Systems Center at Seal Beach, served by GTE; engineers at both sites will use the network to access a computational fluid dynamics engineering graphics application contained on the Cray mainframe, and SMDS, operating at 1.544Mbps, will replace private T1 lines that currently connect the networks; currently, Rockwell runs this application by connecting the sites with two dedicated, leased lines operating at 400Kbps to 500Kbps; the primary objective of the six-month project is to establish procedures that will enable the service to be offered among different phone companies; the areas being analysed are provisioning, trouble resolution, billing and network management; the local area networks will interoperate via AT&T Co’s SuperStar SMDS switches; both companies have announced plans to offer SMDS within their service areas next year, given the approval of the California Public Utilities Commission.
