ATM demise prompts 3Com to focus on LAN products
Connectivity vendor drops CoreBuilder line3Com is bowing out of the market for large enterprise networking clients and wide area networks to focus on local area network products for small- and
Connectivity vendor drops CoreBuilder line
3Com is bowing out of the market for large enterprise networking clients and wide area networks to focus on local area network products for small- and medium-sized hospitals. The company is discontinuing its CoreBuilder, NetBuilder, and PathBuilder product lines; final shipments will be made on June 30. 3Com has entered into an agreement with Extreme Networks to service customers on existing CoreBuilder networks and will provide support for PathBuilder and NetBuilder products for up to five years.
There has been a significant change in the market, said Bruce Patterson, director of global healthcare industry market development for 3Com in Santa Clara, CA. We decided to concentrate on small and medium locations of less than 1000 users in response to high competition in the high-end enterprise market.
The fact that the bottom has dropped out of the ATM market also contributed to 3Coms decision to shift gears. Last September, quality of service standards were set for Gigabit Ethernet (GbE), which provides the same high speeds and levels of service as ATM networks at one-fifth the price. As evidenced in numerous publications and white papers, the computing industry has been watching GbE since the mid-1990s and predicting the downfall of ATM networks as soon as GbE-based products became readily available, because they would build on familiar, ubiquitous, and less expensive components.
3Com enabled its CoreBuilder 9000 switches for both ATM and GbE ports in 1997. According to Patterson, 3Com aims to keep it simple and provide standards-based products; for example, its SuperStack networking product, demoed at the Radiological Society of North America meeting last November, builds on the speed of the GbE technology to provide the ability to move bandwidth-heavy images at real-time transmission rates.
In related news, 3Com is developing a suite of network interface cards (NICs) called Typhoon that have their own chip to encrypt and decrypt data at hardware speeds without slowing the processing speed of the networked computers. The Typhoon NICs will cost only $20 more per card than regular NICs, according to Patterson.
© 2000 Miller Freeman, Inc., a United News & Media company.
- Search again
- Homepage
ASCO: Study Reveals Significant Racial/Ethnic Disparities with PSMA PET Use for Patients with mPCa
May 30th 2025Latinx patients with metastatic prostate cancer were 63 percent less likely than non-Hispanic White patients to have PSMA PET scans, according to a study of 550 patients presented at the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) conference.
Lunit Unveils Enhanced AI-Powered CXR Software Update
May 28th 2025The Lunit Insight CXR4 update reportedly offers new features such as current-prior comparison of chest X-rays (CXRs), acute bone fracture detection and a 99.5 percent negative predictive value (NPV) for identifying normal CXRs.
New MRI Study Questions Use of Corticosteroid Injections for Knee OA
May 27th 2025Two years after intraarticular knee injections for knee osteoarthritis (OA), study participants who had corticosteroid knee injections had greater OA progression than control patients while the use of hyaluronic acid injections was associated with less OA progression.
