ABSTRACT
The technology of Token Ring has been around for over 15 years, and it is a testament to the robustness of the original design concept that many large networks today continue to make use of essentially the same network components that powered those first, early installations. But that is not to say that Token Ring technology has stood still. The demand for increasing network bandwidth drove the introduction in 1989 of 16M bps Token Ring to quadruple the speed of the original 4M bps offering. More recently, the development of Token Ring switching increased backbone capacity to hundreds of megabits per second and added the possibility of dedicated, full duplex links carrying Token Ring traffic at 16M bps in both directions at once.
