Madge hosts meeting to evolve draft of HSTR standard

Waxham Springs, 30 October 97 High Speed Token Ring (HSTR) alliance meeting will be held in the UK and hosted by Madge Networks. The forum plans to use the meeting to evolve the first working draft of the HSTR standard, which was presented to the IEEE 802.5 (Token Ring) committee for peer review and preliminary approval at the IEEE's regularly scheduled meeting on 10 November.

HSTR Alliance technical forum members from participating Token Ring vendors - including Bay Networks, Cisco Systems, IBM, Microvitec/Proteon, Olicom and Xylan, as well as Madge - will work to hammer out a set of specifications that vendors can use to develop HSTR-compliant technology demonstrations at NetWorld+Interop in Las Vegas next spring.

The High Speed Token Ring Alliance HSTRA was formed in August 1997. In initial meetings, the group committed to developing HSTR within the framework of the IEEE 802.5 committee, assuring that current Token Ring equipment will work with the new HSTR standards.

The group has also resolved to define wire speeds that scale from 100 Mbit/s to 1 Gbit/s and has agreed on a timeline for technical meetings, standards ratification and product demonstrations. HSTRA members have also committed to submitting prototype products to UNH for independent pre-standards interoperability testing.

Sandra Wermer