* We have got an offer for 3Com NETBuilder II routers. They seem to be quite * cheap, but I do not have any experience with them. * * If you have such a router, could you please write me your experience * with them, especially compared to CISCO router? Can it really support * BGP 4 routing protocol and RFC877 encapsulation? * Although I haven't used one myself I know there are 3coms in use doing RFC877 (now revised as RFC1356) and they also have participated in the BGP4 trials and have a version of BGP4 that will talk to the cisco implementation

There are a couple of NBII's on the JANET-IP service running RFC877 - they generally work OK though there have been some problems with tunnels not being cleared properly (between one of the 3Com's and a backbone cisco). The jury is still out on this one ... if you want more details you could try Malcolm Ray at the University of Westminster (malcolmr@westminster.ac.uk) We got a very early version of 3Com's BGP4 that seemed to have slipped in by mistake when we field tested their HSSI boards - we never got this going though to be fair we hardly tried very hard ! We were promised some months ago a 'working' copy of BGP4 - this hasn't materialised yet, though there is some confusion here as according to the salesmen BGP4 is out and shipping in v6.2 of their software as a full service product.

I have no idea of performance issues, although there are I believe 3coms (not usre if are NETbuilder IIs though) within the SuperJANET network so perhaps they can help or comparability with a cisco sorry.

A stack of NBII's should be delivered for SuperJANET next week. These will sit on the SMDS - performance tests on these (HSSI boards) showed no significant difference in performance between NBII's, ciscos (AGS+/4) and Wellfleet (BLN) - they were all capable of driving an E3 SMDS link (access class 4 - after overheads 25Mb/s) flat out (but so they should !). Hope this helps Kevin Hoadley, JIPS NOSC.