dougm@ICO.UUCP (10/23/85)
/* Written 8:11 pm Oct 85, 19783 by jackson@ttidcb in ICO:net.dcom */
/* ---------- "Request for Help re. Twisted Pair LA" ---------- */
It depends on what your exact requirements are. If you have an Ethernet based
network, are your protocols media independent or do you require that the headers
look the same as ethernet? What about data rate? You probably won't find a
10Mb/s twisted pair network so there would be problems trying to connect a
10Mb/s ethernet controller to a slow network. Are you running a mixed protocol,
mixed media network? If you are trying to avoid new hardware, good luck.
AT&T's Starlan is a 1Mb/s twisted pair network which follows the IEEE 802.3
standard for packet encapsulation/link level header, etc. and is a proposed
member of the 802.3 family. It is basically an ethernet controller running at
1Mb/s rather than 10Mb/s plus any changes necessary to get timing and other
operating parameters set to appropriate values. Depending on the constraints
on hardware changes and the design of your ethernet controller, it might not
be too hard to make the changes necessary. The software could be left alone.
There are other vendor's with twisted pair networks running at 1Mb and above.
A token ring requires more support from the controller (token management and
the like) so wouldn't be feasable the way you suggest.
I hope this is of some help.
Doug McCallum
Interactive Systems Corp.
{cbosgd, hao, ima}!ico!dougm