The fourteen-year-old IEEE 802.5 token-ring standard committee is discussing its future. A slim majority of the ten participants favor going into hibernation, meaning that they would stop meeting and would deal with essential business via e-mail. The practical effect of that action would be to freeze the standard. The consensus is that Ethernet has become the dominant topology for both LANs and WANs. Sales of token-ring ports dropped 50% in the past two years to 1.4 million per year, most of them to large businesses and universities with large investments in token-ring. The total number of token-ring ports may drop to 25 million in the next two years. One of the major reasons for the greater success of Ethernet in the past few years is that it offers greater bandwidth and lower cost.
In light of the foregoing, libraries on corporate or university -campuses with token-ring networks should seriously consider maintaining Ethernet LANs inside library facilities and connecting to the campus token-ring network via a router.
