Commercial access providers may supplement these pools especially for outlying areas. This will likely include swifter adoption of ATM and direct Internet or vBNS connections for certain projects. 100 Mb Alternative A is the closest to PennNet's current condition. Ethernet or fast Ethernet switches deployed in all buildings reduce the size of the collision domain within buildings and provide a scalable building interconnection. Ethernet switches are deployed within closets if necessary, though shared Ethernets within buildings dominate.
Secure hubs prevent promiscuous listening on shared segments.
A series of smaller routing switches, still located in a central core, start to share a distributed routing load. While management and operations continue to benefit from a single, consolidated location for this equipment, Penn moves one step closer to being able to distribute its routing load to multiple locations when necessary. Since ATM switching is now a feature, some direct ATM connections are made possible into the production network either to support advanced projects now in production or servers that require the added bandwidth. This alternative represents where the Task Force believes Penn should be in 3-5 years. This is mostly dependent on the necessary investment level, but even more important on the development of products and standards in the marketplace to make deployment of or migration to this alternative possible.