MAE-East presentation

Fri Feb 11 20:31:54 UTC 1994

These are some notes that I made as I was preparing my presentation
for the RegTechs meeting in San Diego Jan31/Feb 1.  I have revised them
(some what) in light of some of the conversations & presentations made
at the RegTechs meeting.

There are undoubtably holes & inaccuracies in these notes; please
correct any that you see.
	--asp at uunet.uu.net (Andrew Partan)

MAE-East status

MAE-East is a 10 Meg 'ethernet' made up of 3 rings:
	- Sprint POP to Boone Blvd
	- College Park/ESnet to Boone Blvd
	- College Park/NSFNET, MCI POP, WilTel POP, Union Station, and
	  Boone Blvd
Each ring is made up of 10 Meg slices of a T3 and learning filtering
bridges.
The 3 rings are joined together at Boone Blvd with a small ethernet.

MAE-East is getting pretty loaded and something needs to be done to
increase the bandwidth.

Work is proceeding on several fronts to get this done.

The most popular option seems to be splitting the rings up into
smaller point-to-point links and joining them with a ethernet switch
(like a Kalpana box) at Boone Blvd.

Other options are doing some sort of ATM switch in the middle, or
switching to higher speed ATM, SMDS, or FDDI.

There are some folks working on getting firm pricing for these options.

[Note: This last week there has been some more work done w/ MFS to get
the current technology to work a bit better.  Some of the rings have
been shifted about a bit (I think that the PSI sites are now on the
same ring as ESnet).  There is more being done and things are shifting
fast enough that this will probably be out of date by the time you read
it.]