Re: gigabit router (was Re: Getting a "portable" /19 or /20)

[Greg Maxwell <gmaxwell () martin fl us>]

On Tue, 10 Apr 2001, Craig Partridge wrote:

> Stepping back for a moment -- the answer, clearly, is yes sometime in the
> next few years you'll be able to route gigabits through a PC platform.  Having
> been down this path a few times, I think you underestimate the difficulty
> and are a couple of years too early, but what the heck, if you want to,
> go ahead and build one.  At minimum, we'll all learn something from your
> experience and hey, you might succeed.  Then be prepared to fight to
> maintain your turf against $200 ASIC based 4-port gigabit ethernet
> routers... :-)

If we could buy $200 ASIC based 4-port gigabit ethernet routers we
wouldn't be talking about hacking PC hardware to do this.

Dedicated hardware is certainly the best way to go at this, and with the
volume you could sell of such a device and it's material cost, it's likely
that you could manage to build one for VERY cheap.

However, until we start deploying hacked PCs as highly featured multi-port
gigabit routers, the companies with sufficent backing to design $200
4-port gigabit routers will be obligated to their shareholders to continue
to sell them to us for $2,000+.

So by all means, start building hacked router PCs. Not that I'll
necessarily use one, but I'll be glad to reap the benefits of the
resulting, dedicated purpose, high volume competition. :)

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