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Other Articles by Fritz Nelson

Flirtin' With Disaster, January 11, 1999 CLINTON SAYS BEST MAGAZINE ISSUE EVER, January 25, 1999 The Systems Management Soft-Shoe, February 8, 1999 Product Purchase Life Cycle, February 22, 1999 Every Party Needs a Pooper March 8, 1999

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For this issue, he tested ATM access concentrators (page 53) at the MCI Developer's Lab in Richardson, Texas. This unique lab partnership lets us create and test realistic scenarios you can't duplicate in a typical pristene lab. David used a suite of tests that mixed voice and data traffic over 24 concurrent calls for several hours at T1 speeds. His tests ran across MCI's ATM network through POPs in San Antonio and Houston. Utilization numbers came from analyzers within--not on the edge of--MCI's network.

Moreover, we asked to receive products as a customer would get them. GDC's comes with on-site installation and setup, but integrators install the other three; we installed them ourselves in about three hours each--a sign of the maturity in the ATM WAN market. Meanwhile, GDC required nearly three days to set up its own product--a speed burner that was overkill for our evaluation.

Luckily we had the time to give GDC, since Cisco had "graciously" declined our invitation to participate. Cisco told us some service providers had placed very large orders for the 3810 and its resources would be tied up filling and supporting those orders.

David knows the feeling. He's written for each of the past three issues, including a workshop on frame relay SVCs (February 8) and a column on service-level management (February 22). In between, he created and ran a voice-over-IP demo and seminar at ComNet, and served as Chairman of the Frame Relay Conference '99, April 12-15 in Dallas. He will be speaking at our Internet Security Conference next month (see www.networkcomputing.com/online/isc99.html), and in our next issue, David will barbecue a few cellular providers.

David's busier than, well, Cisco employees boxing up 3810s, so I decided to give him some breathing room to catch up on other "projects"...

· David Willis: Not just an editor, an OS too! Technology editor Mike Fratto discovered e-mail sent to employees of Altiga Networks, whose VPN concentrator he tests in this issue (page 24). The message boasts of routing 50,000 packets per second in internal tests run by its "High Priests of Performance." The subject line: "Let's see DaveOS do this."

This message was a competitive gauntlet tossed down to the core technology of Network Alchemy, a rival that makes clustered VPN technology and boasts remarkable performance and scalability. Altiga takes some juicy potshots at these claims, including one that has DaveOS delivering a throbbing 100,000 packets per second, which Altiga retorts is accomplished with seconds of latency per packet. "A new standard for the industry!" the note proclaims sarcastically. "Maybe they can call this DaveQoS?"

· David Willis: Inspiration. David used IDT's VoIP service to connect calls during his Comnet VoIP demo, and in his article about that testing (Feb. 22), he also discussed IDT's new voice and data business service--Project David.

· David Willis: Product manager. Finally, this message showed up in technology editor Bruce Boardman's inbox: "We would like to offer a phone briefing this week re: Attachmate's Y2K and Euro conversion tool for desktop readiness....David Willis of Attachmate can address this..."

So how busy do we really keep David? To paraphrase Altiga, can Dave do this? Was he secretly working on all this while waiting for GDC to finish setting up its ATM access concentrator? Does one pray to a "High Priest of Performance?" And is "Dave Molta," who reviewed 26 802.11 wireless devices for this issue (page 68) really Mr. Willis' handle? Did Bruce "graciously" decline the phone briefing?

-Fritz Nelson, fnelson@nwc.com