Does Anyone Still Use Token Ring?

blanchae asks: "Does anyone still use Token Ring, or is it dead? I remember hearing about 100 mbps TR a few years ago but nothing since. I remember that the strong point of TR over Ethernet was the QOS and the consistent response time. Does the banking community still use TR?"

Hopefully Not...

[stungod]

About 5 years ago, I worked for a trucking company that was very heavily invested in token ring and would not consider switching to ethernet, no matter how compelling the argument was at that time. I can only imagine it's harder to justify staying on TR now, but it can't be cheap.

Its only advantage was that it could run at much higher utilization than ethernet without your network choking - we would see times where a ring would be running at 75% and that was no problem.

However, it was a real problem from a financial and operational standpoint. When we bought new PC's, we would rip out the ethernet cards and install Olicom TR cards we paid $180 each for - we got a good deal because we bought hundreds of them. Server-class cards were more - a lot more.

And we did get the 100Mb token ring switches, which was truly one of the more absurd things I have ever seen IT money spent on. I still don't have a clear idea how this was a good thing: you got a 100Mb token ring switch, which would create a ring on each port. Then you could plug exactly one device into each port, as long as it had a 100Mb token ring adapter. This was 5 years ago, and I remember that per port, it was price-competitive with Gig-E fiber.

Then there are the usual entertaining issues with drivers and growing the network. Need an extra PC at your desk? You can't just plug a hub in and go - you have to pull another cable from the wiring closet. You need certified drivers for your Windows cluster? How about a touch-screen network device for your truck terminals? A firewall? A NAS? No, you can't have any of those.

I know there are plenty of people who will swear by TR. You'll find the evolved version of this technology in FDDI rings - and it makes a lot of sense and works very well in that application. But as a LAN for your company, it sucks ass...technically, the concept is sound but nobody is developing it further and it takes a lot more specialized knowledge and maintenance overhead than ethernet. And every year that goes by makes it much more expensive to keep it than to switch to ethernet.

I turned down a job 3 years ago at a place that was still running TR - a mid-sized retail chain. They said they were starting to look in to ethernet, but were happy with their token rings. That was the deciding factor for me to keep looking...At this point, a company that isn't actively working to replace TR with something else has some serious management issues and I would wonder what else was lying inder the surface.

So if you can find a few cards and a MAU somewhere, experiment with it at home. But avoid it like the plague in a business setting. That's just my $.02 anyway.

Washinton Mutual

[cybersavior]

Washington Mutual used token-ring networks in most of their branches until 2003. I was a bank teller when they upgraded from OS/2 Warp machines on a Token-ring to Windows XP on Ethernet.

TR is dead....

[eggoeater]

I work for a bank... a LARGE bank.
I know we have one small location that still has TR because the site has been on the chopping block for 4 years.
(It's finally closing this year.)
I know we stopped installing it in new locations about 10 years ago in favor of Ethernet. My site (and most of the rest of the bank) was upgraded from TR to Ethernet(100Mb) about 5 years ago.

Banks and any other large companies are going to stick to industry standards in order to reduce costs and complexity. I know we've had a hell of a time finding replacement hardware for the switching/routing equipment in that last TR location. My point is, why should a large company build a custom LAN network when the cheaper, easier technology will do just fine. e.g. We would have to disable the ethernet adapter in the Dell workstations we use and install TR cards. I have a laptop...I'd have to find a PCMCIA TR card. This is exactly the type of BS that large companies don't want to deal with.

Here's the real reason TR is dead: QOS was only an issue with Ethernet when you had people using hubs. Now that massive switches are the norm, it isn't an issue since each user can run in full duplex. If you're on a hub, you're sharing bandwidth. If you're on a switch, you've got 100Mb all to yourself. (Unlike a hub, the switch can buffer the frames if the destination port is busy.) In addition, you can run in duplex which means your ethernet card can send and receive at the same time. If your office is using a switch, it's your WAN connections you have to worry about, not your LAN.

And thats just for the cube farm. For the server room we have either dual 100Mb or dual 1000Mb connections to multiple backbones (more for redundancy than bandwidth.) There are also dedicated fiber going to SANS drives.

The computer in my cube is piggy-backed onto a Cisco IP phone, which all goes to a single 100Mb switch port. I have never had a problem with it.

Token Ring is DEAD. DEAD. DEAD.

Re:Advantages?

[plover]

It's strictly a cost issue. If you have a 10-15 year old network consisting of a thousand nodes of token ring equipped machines, look at how much it will cost to replace them all with shiny new machines and shiny new cat 5e wiring.

Most places with even the largest investments switched out years ago. At some point the cost of maintaining TR exceeded the cost of reinstalling new network gear. These days, if there are any TR nodes left, they probably exist in isolation. When our company was upgrading the network, the first thing to go was the TR "backbone" network, which was replaced with ethernet, and they installed bridges to the workstation rings. Then, as different groups replaced desktop hardware the new network cabling was pulled at the same time.

The last to be switched were physically remote networks, serving buildings in other cities that housed no technical people. Even if their stuff was working, the cost of maintaining headquarters staff to deal with two different network topologies was higher than replacing their hardware.

The problem is it takes a large initial investment. Non-profit companies, charities, or other firms having a tough time in the current economy may not have the big pile of cash required to switch. It's easier to shell out $150 to replace a broken obsolete card every month than to pay $10,000 to have an office rewired.

Only weird applications still need token ring

[billstewart]

Sometimes you've got old IBM equipment that was working fine in the early 90s and you didn't replace for Y2K, and because you don't want to touch the computers, you don't need to change the routers. Or sometimes you've got a building cable duct full of asbestos so you don't want to touch it, but there's too much metal in the building for wireless to work reliably. Basically, token ring was old a decade ago.

I've had one customer for whom token ring on Shielded Twisted Pair wiring was the right choice even after Cat5 Ethernet cards were cheap - they had lots of Big Electrical Equipment, and the alternative would have been to do fiber, which was cost-prohibitive back then, plus they didn't really need high data rates.

Performance differences weren't really all that significant for the different technologies, except for obvious base-rate differences (100 Mbps >> 16 Mbps > 10 Mbps > 4 Mbps.) Even if they were, Full-Duplex Ethernet (which is pretty much universal these days if you use switches instead of hubs) doesn't have the same issues that half-duplex does.