Budget 2001: Full Coverage

The thrust of the company is in the gigabit enterprise market, convergenceand LAN telephony, wireless, broadband and in the medium and smallenterprise segment. Under the gigabit enterprise market segment 3Com will beintroducing an autosensing aggregator switch that senses between 10/100/1000Mbps and with a cost as low as per port of $330. The company has introducedSwitch 4007 that is a chassis-based high networking switch. Then there isone version of Switch 4900 which is a gigabit on fibre aggregator and itssecond version is gigabyte on copper. 3Com also introduced gigabyte oncopper NICs (Network Interface Cards). These cards can trunk the linkstogether to get a higher bandwidth, provide resilience and bring the cost ofgigabit connectivity down.

Under the wireless segment the company will be introducing AirConnect, awireless LAN which has been introduced globally. AirConnect uses the newtechnology `802.11b' (which is standard for ethernet over wireless and givesa 11mbps connection to its users) and provides wireless connectivity to thedesktop computer and the laptop. This can be used within a distance of 100meters. Under broadband the company has Net over cable modems and all theirproducts are `DOCSIS' compliant (DOCSIS is a standard for connecting dataover cable network). The company has introduced a modem which has both USBand the ethernet connection. The advantage of this is that multiple PCs canbe connected to the cable. For the medium and small enterprises 3Com hasintroduced an Internet server which is a pre-configured product with aset-up of about 15 minutes and has functions of file server, an e-mailserver, a remote access server and a print server. Mr Vallath said that thiswas the first time 3Com which is essentially a networking company isintroducing a product in the server category. The objective of introducingthis product was to provide full solution for the SME segment.