If it worked before...


 Between April 27 and May 23, the scheduled "Phase III" 
 upgrade to the T3 network took place. All of the T3 adapters, 
 DSUs, RS/6000 planar boards, and cables were replaced with 
 newer technology.
  
 "The T3 network has been extremely reliable since November 
 1991," said Mark Knopper, manager of Internet Engineering at 
 Merit. "The RS/960 upgrade has enhanced network capacity 
 such that the impact of moving the NSFNET traffic from T1 to 
 T3 has been negligible."
  
 The recent hardware upgrade is based upon an adapter 
 technology known as RS/960 which supports on-card packet 
 forwarding to other adapters connected across the IBM RS/6000 
 microchannel. The RS/6000 host is used as a network 
 controller for route computation and network management. This 
 technology supports up to five T3 interfaces per router. 
 Packet rates over 10,000 pps with 200 bytes/packet and data 
 throughput approaching 22.5 Mbps have been observed in 
 routine testing on the independent ANS/Merit/IBM/MCI T3 test 
 network, where the routers and circuits are configured 
 similar to the production network.