Is Hyperchip Hype?
Peter Galbraith writes "There was an interview on CBC (here in Canada) last evening about
Hyperchip, a Montreal-based
company that are working on a new type of router that would scale up 1000 times in traffic (so wouldn't be obsolete in less than a year) and would pass packets to their destination in a few hops instead of a dozen or more. Any experts out there think it's hype? Or real?"
The explanation on Hyperchip's "technology" page is pretty thin, but considering they just raised $70 million, I hope they've given more convincing details to their investors.
Cisco has had the technology to do their so called 'smart routing' for years. It's called BGP. I have seen it intelligently route packets across the country that only goes across 2, maybe 3 routers. It seems in this "dot-com" era of techies, no one has a clue about routing. There are so very few people who know what to do with a router, and obviously those people aren't working for any commercial ISPs. I used to work networking for the government, and one of our customers had a problem with routing through UUnet. I contacted their router dept and talked to one of their so-called "router engineers" and had to explain to him how to fix an assymetrical route.
Do a traceroute to yahoo.com. Conceivably, you shouldn't have to go more than 5 hops. But with every major corporation creating a string of routers rather than a mesh.... it takes for ever to get there.
If you're French, there's a 99.5% chance you are inadequate.
"Adequacy.org: Where congenital stupidity is not an option, but a requirement."