D link linux driver

A small start-up firm is promising to re-write the rules that spell out how much money companies will need to pay in order to connect to the Internet or hook up with teleworkers at speeds faster than 128-Kbps Integrated Services Digital Network (ISDN) pipes can deliver.

But industry analysts and end users are divided over whether the channel bonding technology the company uses, which is based on a point-to-point multilink standard and designed to work with standard analog modems or ISDN, is yet up to snuff.

Spellcaster Telecommunications Inc., which is based in Toronto and one-half owned by systems integrator and Internet service provider (ISP) MediaGlobe Inc., unveiled a software package last month that it said will provide ISPs and their corporate customers with the ability to bond several connections into a single logical channel via PCs running the Linux operating system rather than through more expensive routing equipment. Eric Petersen, chief technical officer at Spellcaster, said at a press conference that the software, called Babylon, is also designed to offer companies that require more bandwidth than 128-Kbps an alternative to Frame Relay or T-1 services.

"A very big area is not so much providing big bandwidth but going more grassroots for customers that might not have $2,500 for Internet access," Petersen said.

While the technology has been used in routers for several years, Petersen added that such equipment at the low end of the price range was not designed to multilink more than two channels simultaneously and in many cases moving up the bandwidth scale likely means abandoning a single ISDN port router in favor of the more pricey ones with four or more ports.

"It's not so much a question of what we have added to the software as what they have taken away because they designed their implementations to be able to handle 128-Kbps and never bothered to check it against anything higher," Petersen said.

"We've been testing (Babylon) all along with the mind to go to four, or six, or eight channels. It depends on what you're doing but I'd say multilinking 50 channels wouldn't be out of the question."

John Girard, a research director at the Stamford, Conn.-based consultancy the Gartner Group Inc., said, however, that while ISDN channel bonding is likely "easier" than performing the same trick with analog modems, the technology still demonstrates "inconsistent behavior" and normally doesn't allow remote users to ship multiple protocols through a single logical pipe. "The biggest issue we hear for point-to-point multilink bonding is that a lot of the customer premise equipment just doesn't bond properly," Girard said.

When Larson Software first tried to link two ISDN channels through adapters on a PC running Linux earlier this year, the company also had problems with system crashes because the driver used an ISDN subsystem of the operating system that was designed to work with European gear rather than North American adapters.

But Patrick St. Jean, systems administrator at the Houston-based firm, said Larson has been beta testing Babylon for Internet connectivity at 128-Kbps for about one month without any problems.

The company, which writes software to allow users to store and plot large Computer Graphics Metafiles, currently hosts its Web site, e-mail server and gateway to an FTP site on a single PC running Linux and a Pentium 133-MHz chip.

"We're fielding about 10 to 15 hits a minute right now on our Web site and getting bounced pretty good but everything is performing admirably," St. Jean said.

The Babylon software is designed to multilink any point-to-point framed data streams including ISDN.

According to a report from the market research firm Frost & Sullivan, revenues for ISDN customer premise equipment will grow to $6.2 billion (U.S.) by 2002 from $2.3 billion (U.S.) in 1995.

Most of that growth, the report said, will come from increasing demands for Internet and intranet connectivity.

COPYRIGHT 1997 Transcontinental Media IT Business Group
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group