My Most Memorable WAN

Over many decades I have worked with many WAN (Wide Area Network) vendors and Equipment Manufacturers. Some of the most interesting and brightest people I have ever met, I found working in this sector.
Sadly very few of these companies still exist today, this as they were ultimately bought out and disappeared into the void of larger conglomerates. Many of those large corporate entities have themselves long disappeared too (anyone remember Nortel, Newbridge, Wellfleet, Cabletron, 3COM, SynOptics, Ascend, Bay Networks & Ungermann-Bass etc. ?).

In 1992 I started looking at the possibility of integrating Voice and Data. Back then, many folk thought I was crazy trying to go down this path. This in an era of separate routers and multiplexers.
My research led me to a company called Micom Communications Corporation. Based in Simi Valley (outside of Los Angeles). They really were developing leading edge Network Integration Technology.

In early 1993 I went to visit Micom and was truly blown away at what they were able to demonstrate, even though their product (Micom Marathon 10K) was still in beta testing at the time. But for me, it was a no brainer...this product would pay for itself in 12 months.....so took a gamble, and bought a decent sized Marathon network from them. It was still undergoing beta testing at that time too.

In 1993 the marathon network went live and it was huge success. It paid for itself in less than a year and in 1995 I returned to Micom, this time to expand the system to enable full mesh (redundant) networking. In 1995 the upgrade was completed.
So successful was this Micom technology, that when it was finally replaced (+7 years later), the new networking supplier (the world's no 1 vendor, I may add) was unable to deliver anything like the voice quality we had been using for all those years....and eventually gave up trying to "fix" these issues and we simply had to suffer with an inferior voice solution!

Very little is ever mentioned about Micom Communications Corp today. In reality, it met its demise in 1996 when it was bought out by Nortel, and integrated into the Nortel Passport range of products. Nortel itself was to spectacularly implode in 2009 when it went bankrupt.

I was very fortunate to have stumbled upon this company and had had the opportunity to really get to know their equipment very well. This well before the era of Voice over IP and what was to become REAL Network Integration.