Woodcliff Lake, New Jersey-based Ascom Timeplex Inc is shipping the ST-50, the latest member of its Synchrony product family. Incorporating a new capability that the company has termed Express Switching, the ST-50 is designed to enable users to consolidate their voice, video and data traffic over wide area backbones, says Ascom. A higher-end product – the ST-1000 – is due to follow next month, with another enhancement dubbed Express Routing. Express Switching is a hybrid technology, providing combined Frame Relay and circuit-switched communications across the same backbone. The technology essentially divides the bandwidth into three: one user-specified chunk for constant-bit-rate speech and video traffic; the second, also user-specified, for data; while the third is dynamically allocated according to requirements and usage patterns. When no constant-bit-rate traffic is being passed, however, the technology is said to reallocate its reserved bandwidth to data traffic. Although the product is said to conform to industry-standard Frame Relay and circuit-switched specifications, the combination of the two is proprietary to Ascom, meaning that the product cannot be used across public services, so the company is pitching it at leased line backbones. The ST-50 is said to provide 160Mbps of switching capacity, and has 14 available slots, expandable to a maximum of 59 with the addition of extra chassis. Base price for the chassis and controller is $20,500. It accepts the standard Synchrony interface boards, including a serial data board for $4,000, a PABX board for $9,500, and a Frame Relay server board for $8,000. The forthcoming ST-1000 takes the wide area functions of the ST-50 and adds local area routing for Ethernet, Token Ring, and Fibre Distributed Data Interface, legacy protocol support for SNA and NetBIOS, a dial-up back-up modem, and speech compression through the new Express Routing capability. Express Routing can prioritise data by protocol, address, application, or user, says the company. Rather than encapsulating SNA and other legacy protocols within connectionless local area network protocols such as TCP/IP, Ascom has chosen to switch the data by Frame Relay Permanent Virtual Circuits as it traverses intermediate routers. This is said to speed efficiency by eliminating the need for network-layer routing at intermediate nodes. The ST-1000 has 16 available slots, with the base price for the chassis and controller starting at $20,500. Again, it uses standard Synchrony boards, including a two-port Token Ring board for $8,500, and a four-port Ethernet board for $8,500.
