News, trends and analysis
	Quick Bits Wanna Buy A Wing? Boeing isn't saying how much revenue its new PART Web site has generated, but it admits recording 150,000 transactions during its first six months. About 200 customers have surfed the site to order parts, get quotes and check the status of shipments. The More, The Merrier MCI is all smiles: The Internet2 consortium of universities has joined the National Science Foundation's (NSF) vBNS research backbone network. Internet2 joined vBNS, MCI 's showcase for high-speed applications like video, mathematical models and next-generation IP, after receiving NSF grants for linking to the network.. Hot And Handy Thanks to the popularity of U.S. Robotics' PalmPilot and Sharp's Zaurus, international Data Corp. predicts that worldwid e shipments of handheld companions, smart phones and devices like pen-based systems will increase 77.1 percent this year to 5.5 million units. If there is something we ought to know, we welcome proposals for articles. Please e-mail us at H-REPORT@nwc.com.
What's In A Name? By Kelly Jackson Higgins Remember the brouter? New hybrid router/switch devices, like Rapid City's new FIRST line of gigabit-speed routin g switches, which ship this month, are almost a throwback to those old bridge-router combos. Amir Khan, a Rapid City product manager, says the latest hybrid devices let you separate physical and logical network infrastructures, something you couldn't do with ordinary LAN switches. But the taxonomy remains as complicated, cloudy and driven by marketing hype as it was in the brouter days. In theory, the new devices--actually switch engines that can route those hallowed IP packets--are next-generation bridges that route, just as brouters were. But the similarity ends there, because whereas bridges were nothing more than an extension cord for the network, LAN switches were installed to switch channels on networks and create virtual LANs. When LAN switching exploded a couple of years ago, network managers rushed to buy these cheaper, faster and simpler devices to direct their network traffic. But no one wants a huge, flat network, and virtual LANs needed a way to connect, so routing has found its w ay inside switches. Rapid City's FIRST line, Bay Networks' Switch Node and products from Extreme Networks and others are testimonials to the fact that you can't build a huge switched network without some routing, too. The FIRST switch can route IP packets at wire speed, something traditional routers were unable to do, according to officials at Rapid City. FIRST is intended as a switch firs t and foremost, with IP routing as its value-added feature. It doesn't support any WAN interfaces, so you can't use it for WAN access, just for routing and switching in a corporate or campus network. Changing The Rules Of The Game Meet the new breed of high-tech vendors, where the buzz in the boardroom is all about company--not product, life cycle or short-term strategy. To succeed in today's nearly $1 trillion electronics industry, vendors are adopting new technologies a little mo re slowly and deliberately, according to a recent study on the global high-tech field conducted by Andersen Consulting. Companies like Hewlett-Packard Co. got burned by false starts in set-top box and cable modem technologies, says Russ Craig, the Andersen partner who headed the study, called "Exploiting Uncertainty: High-Tech's High Performers Change the Dynamics of Competition." HP responded by abandoning its development efforts in those products. Even prospective Gigabit Ethernet vendors are cautious about taking the plunge.

Context Mappi ng the Rocky Road to Authentication by Christy Hudgins-Bonafield Internet Peer Preasure; For Sale: Ipv6 (Any Takers?); IP Wherever You Go by Kelly Jackson Higgins Updated July 8, 1997