Christopher Smith

Can Nortel Pull an AMD on Cisco? Enough To Make It Worth Another Look?

Perhaps. I've used and recommended Cisco products because they're reliable, full-featured, and (generally) easy to configure. However, they're also terribly expensive.

I think rather than Nortel, the dark-horse competitor is Vyatta, which is producing open-source router software that runs on commodity x86 hardware. I've used this type of routing before, and an old Pentium-90 with an ISA network card was able to keep up with a full-speed 10Mb connection.