A number of Extreme's other proposals were also proprietary, and were listed in place of standards-based solutions. For example, it proposed "Extreme Networks' Software-Controlled Redundant Port" technology as a replacement for standards-based Spanning Tree Protocol (IEEE 802.1d) without mentioning the alternative RSTP (Rapid Spanning Tree Protocol, IEEE 802.1w), which Foundry claimed converged in 52 ms compared with STP's 30 to 45 seconds. No doubt Extreme believes its approach is superior--and perhaps the company is correct--but our preference is to stick with standards. It would take a lot to convince us otherwise. And, in place of 802.1x, Extreme suggested its "Network Login," system, touting its superiority. Again, it will take some convincing for us to adopt this view.
Pricing of Extreme's solution providing 100 Mbps to the desktop included its chassis-based products at the core and as aggregators in the buildings, with stackables delivering desktop connectivity. The bottom line was $590,657, comparable to the price of Foundry's stackable solution and almost twice the price of the Enterasys and Alcatel stackable proposals. The RFI revealed no reason for this imbalance.
Extreme's gigabit to the desktop scenario used chassis from end to end, and the $1,040,040 cost was comparable to those of the Foundry and Enterasys proposals. Alcatel's proposal for 100-Mbps desktop connectivity was the least expensive of all the vendors' proposals for that scenario, both for powered ports, at $331,912, and for nonpowered ports, at $268,275. The company did not, however, provide pricing for 10 Gigabit ports, which could have had a significant impact on our price calculations.
Alcatel was the only vendor to offer built-in PoE support. This isn't a surprise when you consider that the company has had a leading VoIP solution for several years. One caveat: The PoE component was not based on the 802.3af standard, so in case we might decide to use another vendor's Ethernet phones down the road, we would need some assurance they would be compatible.
Unfortunately Alcatel didn't come up with a gigabit-to-the-desktop quote. We did follow up on this, and a spokesperson said the company is working on a stackable solution but couldn't provide any details. Another problem was that Alcatel was unable to deliver a 10 Gigabit interface. The company claimed that it has one planned for mid-2003 but said it was unable to give more specifics.
