The Road To Terabit Ethernet 210
stinkymountain writes "Pre-standard 40 Gigabit and 100 Gigabit Ethernet products — server network interface cards, switch uplinks and switches — are expected to hit the market later this year. Standards-compliant products are expected to ship in the second half of next year, not long after the expected June 2010 ratification of the 802.3ba standard. Despite the global economic slowdown, global revenue for 10G fixed Ethernet switches doubled in 2008, according to Infonetics. There is pent-up demand for 40 Gigabit and 100 Gigabit Ethernet, says John D'Ambrosia, chair of the 802.3ba task force in the IEEE and a senior research scientist at Force10 Networks. 'There are a number of people already who are using link aggregation to try and create pipes of that capacity,' he says. 'It's not the cleanest way to do things...(but) people already need that capacity.' D'Ambrosia says even though 40/100G Ethernet products haven't arrived yet, he's already thinking ahead to terabit Ethernet standards and products by 2015. 'We are going to see a call for a higher speed much sooner than we saw the call for this generation' of 10/40/100G Ethernet, he says."
10 mbit/s ought to be enough for anybody (Score:2, Funny)
;)
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Don't you mean 5 Mebibit per second?
That gives you 640KB per second.
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Initially this is to connect disks to database engines and to push entire virtual machines onto servers to handle demand spikes and things like that. Later to handle the upstream end of pushing multiple HD video streams out from servers towards large numbers of clients.
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3D high definition voxel video.
That will probably eat a bit of bandwidth.
By that time the minimum resolution will be 2048 x 2048 x 2048 voxels 8 bytes per voxel for RGBA at 128 frames per second. Which adds up to 8,796,093,022,208 or 8TB/sec. maybe we can get 1:1000 compression ratio, so that will end up with 8GB/sec.
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Sweet, more pixels than retinal ganglion cells. Where can I get an eye upgrade?
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you get 10mbit/s??? Lucky!
Physics? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Physics? (Score:5, Funny)
I mean at some point doesn't it become impossible to move electrons or modulate data any faster?
Nah, at that point you just place the whole ethernet infrastructure within a subspace field, modulate the deflector dish a little bit and you'll be off and running.
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You left out the 'tachyon pulse' part. Thats the way to get your data moving faster than light.
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That's more a problem with copper wiring. Cat5e seems to have problems reaching above 700-800 Mbits/s, I assume cat6 does better but wouldn't expect to see 10Gbit or even close.
At this point we haven't really started to see limitations on how fast a fiber optic connection can be switched, although I wouldn't doubt there being a theoretical limit.
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Umm, I've reached 950 Mbit/s on Cat5e before. Fairly long (70-80 yards) runs of it too. Are you sure you aren't running into a limitation of your hardware? I've seen a lot of PCs with crummy NICs or slow PCI buses that can't reach full gigabit speeds no matter how good the cabling is.
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Most of our network cards use intel chipsets. What OS are you using? I've never been able to fully saturate gigabit or even 100mbit ethernet under Windows. Even when using simple protocols like FTP it usually tops out at 80-90% of network capacity. Using more complicated ones (SMB/windows file sharing comes to mind) will reduce it even further. Transfers between two Linux machines are another matter. I've been able to saturate 100mbit networks easily using a variety of protocols and achieve the aforem
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when i worked for the 10 gigabit ethernet consortium at the UNH IOL (www.iol.unh.edu), i had to do a 10 gig demo once. not naming vendors, i wasn't able to get it above 1.1 gigabit/second with commodity pc hardware. we had pattern generators, but those don't count in the real world.
for 1 gigabit, the best line utilization i ever got was about 97%, using two linux boxes, netcat, and piping /dev/random into /dev/null across it. i'm not a math guy so i can't say what the theoretical max is.
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Have you tried disabling the QoS bandwidth reserve thing? IIRC, Windows reserves a portion of the network throughput for QoS stuff (something like 10-20%). I forget how to do it exactly... I think you have to go into the Group Policy Editor or something. Although I do know for a fact that if you use nLite to make an XP install you can remove it entirely.
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The issue with 56k connections was never about copper limitations; in fact some of the older houses actually were using copper-clad steel wiring. The FCC introduced a law to limit the connection speed shortly after the introduction of 56k modems, this resulted in most being limited to 51-53k instead.
The real issue that kept higher speed modems from becoming commonplace was a lack of incentive to ISPs. Providing line quality better than needed for voice conversations didn't have any pay-back for telephone
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I also remember when everyone thought that the highest download speed you could get over a telephone wire was the 56kbps modems of yesteryear because that was the limit of copper phone wire.
Nobody ever thought that was the limit of copper phone wire. It was known as early as the 60s that the physical layer was capable of transmitting higher frequencies than those used for plain old telephone service. The limitation came because of the fact that modems operated over POTS, which was limited to 64k of bandwidth per voice channel.
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Does anyone know what are the physical limitations of highspeed ethernet? I mean at some point doesn't it become impossible to move electrons or modulate data any faster?
Very roughly, at one terahertz you can transmit one terabit. Now whats the frequency of an XRay laser expressed in hertz?
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I think the grand parent was talking about using copper wire as a conduit.
I agree, optical will go much, much, much faster. And later, when we have vacuum-optic cables...well, all that much faster, I suppose.
It's those pesky optical logic gates that are holding us back.
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Does anyone know what are the physical limitations of highspeed ethernet? I mean at some point doesn't it become impossible to move electrons or modulate data any faster?
The speed of light limitation will limit ping times over a set distance. Upgrading to terabit speed doesn't make the end nodes further apart, it widens the pipe between them. So, no, I don't see a theoretical limit to how wide the pipe can be. At some point, you'd need a really thick cable, I suppose, which could become impractical.
There's other bottlenecks, too, such as the speed of the systems' internal busses, or storage devices, though.
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Re:Physics? (Score:5, Interesting)
The Shannon-Hartley theorem [wikipedia.org] states that the channel capacity (e.g. the data bandwidth, measured in bits per second) is related to the channel bandwidth (measured in hertz). If we assume a very pessimistic signal to noise ratio of 1:1, the SH theorem says that the cable's bandwidth in hertz will be the same as the cable's bandwidth in bps.
So if we want a cable capable of transmitting information at 1tbps, the cable will need a bandwidth of roughly 1000 GHz. That means that it would be impossible to carry that amount of information using even microwaves. We're talking about at minimum infrared light. Or in other words -- we're talking about fiber optics, not cat5.
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That all depends. While networking has traditionally been a serial connection, there's nothing stopping multi-mode connections and in fact multi-mode already has some implementations.
Spread your 1Tbit connection across 10 lines and you only need 100Gbit's per line.
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We're talking about at minimum infrared light. Or in other words -- we're talking about fiber optics, not cat5.
Except for the fact that:
1. Twisted pair ethernet uses electrical signal modulation, not photon modulation.
2. There are 4 pairs of wire in twisted pair ethernet cable.
3. The S/N ratio is a LOT higher than 1/1
Re:Physics? (Score:4, Informative)
The Shannon-Hartley theorem is not the relevant limit. The hard limit for copper is the cutt-off frequency, and for optical systems other technical challenges come into play.
Any given copper wire has an associated cutoff frequency. Passed this frequency, it is almost impossible to get significant amounts of energy to pass through the cable. The cutoff is very steep.
For most types of coaxial cable, the cutoff frequency is on the order of 1 GHz to 8 GHz. Since the bandwidth required for a working communications link is generally higher than the bandwidth of the cable, copper wiring will top out at something on the order of a few GHz for most practical applications. UTP cable, as used in existing Ethernet, will perform worse than coaxial cable. For practical purposes, we have probably used all of its available bandwidth for 1 Gb Ethernet. UTP has a cutoff frequency on the order of 300 to 500 MHz, if memory serves. As such, the 1 Gb Ethernet specification resorts to uses all four pairs to achieve the 1Gb rated speed.
To increase bandwidth further, either microwave or optical waveguides can be used. Microwave waveguides are not practical for personal computer use. This leaves optical fiber, which is an optical waveguide.
Optical fiber has an essentially unlimited bandwidth, on the order of 500 Tb/s. Its performance is primarily limited by cost reasons and technical reasons relating to receivers and transmitters. It is difficult to generate the variable frequency light sources required to make use of the vast amounts of light spectrum. Separation of the light sources at the receiver is also a major issue. There are optical dispersion problems relating to the cable, but these are easier to deal with than the problems of creating a precision wide-band variable frequency laser.
In general, the technologies at optical speeds are not as well developed as the electrical technologies for microwave, broadcast, and copper communications transmission. It is much more difficult to use all available bandwidth at optical speeds, than at copper speeds. However, since the theoretical bandwidth at optical speeds is huge, much higher communication speeds are possible with optical.
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As others already pointed out, with a better S/N ratio you can lower the frequency bandwidth, although impedance mismatches become more of a problem. If you try to send a 250 GHz signal through the cable, the wavelength is about 1 mm, which means
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How about using 2 wires to send 2 bits simultaneously? Doesn't that solve the problem?
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We can always keep adding more bandwidth - in the extreme case (as in TFS) by trunking together more of the same links. But latency is not really improving. Ethernet itself is very high-latency compared to e.g. Infiniband. But fundamental limits of latency are impossible to overcome, and the best you can do is get closer and closer, perhaps asymptotically so. Between our planet and another, any latency in hardware is going to be a rounding error compared to the latency in the electromagnetic waves themselve
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Depends what you mean with speed. The lowest possibel latency is limited by teh speed of light.
Bandwidth is limited by the number of "tubes" you can run and how much data you can push down each tube. In principle there's nothing stopping you from doing something crazy like encoding your data on DNA strands that you dissolve in a soup and pu
Re:Physics? (Score:5, Informative)
In practical applications, the latency is greater for two reasons. The most obvious is that we are not laying cables in a straight line. If I ping the machine I have on the other side of the park from here, the data goes via London, a few hundred kilometres out of the way. If you use satellite relays, then the signal is bouncing up and down between the surface and the satellite's orbit at least once, adding to the distance.
The second reason is switching time. The signal travelling along the wire is very quick, but even on a single-segment network that data has to be processed by two network cards, encoded going out and decoded coming in, transferred to and from userspace process's address spaces and so on. Things like infiniband lower this latency by allowing userspace code to write directly to the card, which removes some but not all of the overhead. If you are using fibre then the transformation between an electrical signal and a sequence of photons, and then back again, adds still more latency. In a switched or routed network (like, for example, the Internet), this has to be done several times because (outside of labs) we can't route packets without turning them back into electronic signals. Most routers will queue a few packets while making decisions and at the very least they typically read the entire packet off the line before routing it, which, again, adds a bit of latency.
In terms of throughput, there is no theoretical limit. If you can send one bit per photon, you can double the throughput by doubling the number of photons (i.e. just use two fibres). The limit is set by cost, rather than by physics. There are a few physical limits which affect this. Shannon's limit gives an upper bound on the number of symbols per second you can send across any given link, given an amount of signal bandwidth and a signal-to-noise ratio. This is quite misleading, however, because the number of symbols does not directly correlate to a number of bits. Early modems used two tones and got speed increases by switching between the two faster. Later ones used a number of different tones and so transmitted the same number of symbols per second but more bits. The same is done with fibre, for example using polarised photons or photons of different wavelengths to provide different virtual channels within a single fibre. These can be detected separately and distinguished from each other. If, for example, you send photons of four different wavelengths, you can send two bits per photon instead of one. If you use 16 different wavelengths, you can send four bits per photon.
When it comes to radio transmission, there are some even more interesting effects. If you've tried receiving analogue TV between hills, you will have seen a ghosting effect because your signal comes via two different paths. It turns out that, with two different transmitters, you can distinguish between them even if they are transmitting on the same frequency, by measuring the different paths each takes. This is particularly interesting for things like WiFi, because in urban environments (where you have the most people trying to use the same radio bandwidth at once), you get more possible return paths (due to more objects that bounce the signals), and so (given enough processing power), you can discern more individual transmitters, giving more usable bandwidth. There are lots of tricks like this - probably a great many that no one has thought of yet - that can provide greater throughput in exchange for more signal processing power.
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If, for example, you send photons of four different wavelengths, you can send two bits per photon instead of one. If you use 16 different wavelengths, you can send four bits per photon.
How about this: What if you used a monochromatic light source in a single mode, polarization-maintaining fiber and had your "bits" be the polarization phase? If you divided the phase (0-2*Pi) into 256 chunks, you could send a byte per photon! With more sensitive equipment, you could get even more. Anyone heard of this?
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You have a fundamentally flawed understanding of how waveforms propagate over a medium.
Electrons in a physical signal such as one that is transmitted via ethernet do NOT move at the speed of light or anywhere near it. If that happened, there would be near infinite current; which would fry anything and everything it touched.
The signal propagates as a wave. The electrons only shift slightly because we are talking about very small current here. I won't go into the details of electron behavior with respect to
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In theory it is possible to create a system that transmits informations faster than the speed of light.... It is however obviously impossible to make those perfect materials, thus we're bound to sub-c communications.
I don't think it's accurate to says that FTL communication is possible, even in theory, if the materials the theory would require are themselves impossible.
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Yes, but when using perfect materials to teach basic concepts it's important to limit their use to situations where the differences between theory and practice are insignificant. Your attempt to describe a means of FTL communication applies perfect materials to a situation where the differences fundamentally influence the result.
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Taking a perfect weightless incompressible solid marbles, and place them in a 1 lightyear long gutter made of a similar perfect inelastic material.
Why go through so much trouble? Make a very long rod. Push and pull it from one end, and you will transmit information.
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I believe transmitting information faster than light is explicitly ruled out by the special theory of relativity, and leads to all sorts of paradoxes if it's posited to be possible. That's not just a practical limitation on materials science, but a fundamental physical law, so I suspect there must be some other explanation for why this marble thought experiment doesn't work.
My guess is that the intuition of the incompressible-marbles-transmit-signals-instantly example discounts relativistic effects, so only
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I don't think that works either: the consensus of physicists at least presently is that entanglement alone cannot transmit classical information, stated as the "no-communication theorem [wikipedia.org]". Quantum entanglement can be used together with a classical communication channel to transit information via quantum teleportation [wikipedia.org], in which information that doesn't flow over the classical communication channel nonetheless gets spookily transmitted. But the requirement of a classical communication channel does still mean n
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This is my naive (and quite possibly incorrect) understanding of the mechanical wave prop
Gee, that's great. (Score:5, Insightful)
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Then you're not involved in HPC applications that demand an extremely fast physical layer (e.g., clustering).
"We think we'll need even more speed... later on" (Score:2, Funny)
Bah (Score:2, Funny)
And you tell that to the kids today and they won't believe you. Bah. Spit.
Why? (Score:3, Insightful)
Why?
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Cloud computing.
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Cloud computing
Doesn't really answer the question. To elaborate: most current computer systems are incapable of maxing out Gigabit ethernet. For any nontrivial application you're going to be loading data from disk, and unless you have very fast disks you're not going to hit 1Gbps.
Now I can see 10 or even 100Gbps being sensible for high performance computing applications. But terabit? Isn't that a little OTT?
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Terabit, at the moment, is entirely for enterprise, where the amount of hard drives connected to the bigger machines lies in the triple to quadruple digits. However, 10G is at least useful for higher-end consumers.
8 hard drives in a RAID6 array managing full speed (approx. 20mbytes/sec. per drive?) hits 120 megabytes/sec., already reaching gigabit's limits. Add two more arrays and 10G becomes useful. While I personally can't see much of a use for that beyond, say, murdering load times in modern games (and m
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Porn
Please make IEEE-1588 a standard part of 1TbE (Score:5, Interesting)
An open letter to any hardware vendor considering making chips for these higher speed protocols:
Please add the timestamp counters needed to support IEEE-1588 Precise Timing Protocol [nist.gov]. These counters don't add much in the way of complexity when added to the NIC, but they are VERY complex to add after the fact.
Being able to synchronize the clocks of 2 hosts to 5nS or less may seem esoteric right now, but for these sorts of transfer speeds, you are going to have a significant number of users (Test and Measurement folks like me, scientists at places like CERN and FermiLab, grid computing) who will need that kind of time sync.
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An open letter to any hardware vendor considering making chips for these higher speed protocols:
Please add the timestamp counters needed to support IEEE-1588 Precise Timing Protocol [nist.gov]. These counters don't add much in the way of complexity when added to the NIC, but they are VERY complex to add after the fact.
Being able to synchronize the clocks of 2 hosts to 5nS or less may seem esoteric right now, but for these sorts of transfer speeds, you are going to have a significant number of users (Test and Measurement folks like me, scientists at places like CERN and FermiLab, grid computing) who will need that kind of time sync.
http://www.ieee802.org/1/pages/802.1as.html [ieee802.org]
There you go.
And it will be integrated directly into the CPU (Score:3, Interesting)
cause the PCIe bus is way too slow for transporting terabits.
Or am I wrong?
bye egghat
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You're wrong. Even the original PCIe specification supports around 2000MBytes/sec (or around 20Gbits/sec) on an 8x link. You get double that with PCIe2, and there's always the option to go with x16. All together the maximum theoretical throughput currently available on PCIe is around 80Gbits/sec per card.
PCIe3 will be introduced years before terabit ethernet, doubling theoretical throughput again.
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But that's not terabit/s. Even with PCIe3.
Or am I missing sth?
Bye egghat
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The PCIe bus is not the only problem. Even at 10Gb Ethernet, the load on the CPU of processing each interrupt corresponding to each packet arriving on the network becomes significant. At 1 Tb/s, your network speed is substantially higher than both the peak hard drive bandwidth (3 Gb/s) in your average desktop computer. At 1 Tb/s, you could fill a 1 TB hard drive in 8 seconds flat!
For the moment, these high speed technologies will be primarily used in the network and cabling closets, where the aggregate
Stragglers in the March of Progress (Score:2, Funny)
By 2015... (Score:5, Funny)
40 Gigabit Ethernet explained (Score:5, Informative)
So that's why we're making a stop at 40 Gbps instead of going straight to 100 Gbps. Existing technology is being reused to get a useful product to market faster.
Incidentally, 10 Gigabit Ethernet is similarly based on OC-192 technology, so it's actually 9.953280 Gbps.
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Well, the 10G WAN PHY is 9.953Gb/s but the 10G LAN PHY is certainly 10Gb/s.
For a moment there... (Score:2, Funny)
'Road'? Shouldn't that be 'Bridge'? (Score:3, Funny)
Didn't anyone else think 'Bridge to Terabit Ether'?
What a missed headline opportunity.
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I reckon I'd best roll out the gigabit switches around here. I hate when stuff gets obsolescent before I deploy it.
Re:More data forces the need for more bandwidth (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't see gigabit being superseeded for connections to end systems anytime soon. 10GBASE-CX requires expensive cable and has annoying run-length limitations. IIRC 10GBASE-T is a power hog. Fiber is both expensive and a PITA for such applications (I very much doubt fiber patch cords would last very long in a typical desktop environment)
It might be an idea to select gigabit switches with the capability to handle 10 gigabit uplinks though.
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10 years, maybe 15, and we'll all be on fiber.
Except for those places that are still using BNC connectors on their coax, of course. They'll never change.
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10 years, maybe 15, and we'll all be on fiber.
On what do you base this claim?
How do you propose to get arround the problem that fiber patch cords are easilly damaged?
What applications do you think will require this kind of bandwidth? HD video with moderate compression should easilly fit into a gigabit.
Re:More data forces the need for more bandwidth (Score:4, Informative)
Corning's bendable fiber. There ya go.
http://www.xchangemag.com/hotnews/77h23134942.html [xchangemag.com]
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Fiber in the future... (Score:5, Informative)
Personally, much like how BNC is still hanging around in a few spots, I think 15 years for 'more than half' would be optimistic. On the other hand, I have actually dealt with installed fiber to the desktop systems, so I have a bit of experience.
Fiber patch cords aren't as easily damaged anymore, especially for the plastic multimode stuff. There's also nothing preventing them coming out with patch cords that are armored to the diameter of today's cat6 cables. That's a LOT of armor. ;)
Another option would be to steal a bit of PoE technology - make the computer's ethernet port support PoE, which feeds a media converter in the wall. Other options include fiber with a couple of small gauge wires with it to provide power to the MC in the jack, wiring AC to the jack, etc...
Why I see fiber eventually winning, even to the desktop.
1. Cost - Copper keeps going up in price, while fiber remains stable or even drops, relatively. Even today bulk gigabit+ capable fiber can be obtained cheaper than bulk cat6 cable. What currently kills fiber to the desktop is generally connector cost, combined with higher adapter cost because they're 'special purpose'. Still, laser tech keeps getting cheaper. Many motherboards today have optical connectors on them for the audio. Network adapter is a different matter, but the potential is there. Cat6 connectors are a bit harder to terminate and are also a bit more expensive. Thus far, the higher speed copper ones I've read about have been even harder. So that advantage copper has is going away.
2. Speed - Gigabit cat5e/6 costs more than old style cat5, which is more than phone quality cat3. They're looking at having to add wires to break gigabit speeds, and change the connecter so it's no longer RJ45 compatible. This, to me, breaks the backwards compatibility that has allowed twisted pair to win for so long.
3. Range - With a large building, the difference between fiber and copper can be the difference between having 1 network room and 8 or more network closets with powered equipment in them. If fiber was a bit cheaper, I'd run large multifiber wires to the closets, and merely have a patch panel inside to distribute the lines out to the various jacks.
4. Weight & Bulk - Cat6+ is getting heavier and heavier - computer density is still increasing today. With the increase in weight and bulk, existing building cable trays and runs are becoming overloaded. Adding more is an expensive proposition, and I estimate that I can fit two times as many fiber cords into a given cable tray, at half the weight over copper runs. Even more if you put in patch closets so that you run many pair.
5. Emissions - fiber doesn't emit or be affected by EMF radiation.
6. Future proofing - copper is pushing it's limits, fiber installed today would likely only need minimal modifications to support terabit speeds in the future.
What applications do you think will require this kind of bandwidth? HD video with moderate compression should easilly fit into a gigabit.
Well, how about HD 3D video? 120-150HZ refresh rates combined with blink glasses to display those 3D videos that movie theaters are showing?
Still, for most business uses, I tend to say that even 10meg connections are more than enough for most users. Seriously, we still occasionally find a 10 meg hub with some users on it. Thus why speed is only one of the advantages fiber has. Cost, Range, and bulk are bigger ones. Range and bulk because, well, they increase costs.
What I think fiber to the desktop needs is the equivalent to 10baseT - an open, low cost standard that is cheap and easy to use. Right now you have a dozen of propriatary connectors. Some are tougher, some are cheaper, etc... We need the equivalent of the RJ-45.
For fiber I'd consier a standard specifying optional small gauge metallic wires for power transmission to compete with PoE, one of the things keeping copper alive. Being pure power, it could be injected cheaply and effectively just about anywhere. Just keep the voltage low enough to not hurt anyone - depowering such as system could be a nightmare.
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What applications do you think will require this kind of bandwidth? HD video with moderate compression should easilly fit into a gigabit.
Why settle for "moderate compression?" Dalsa Raw [wikipedia.org] requires 3.2 Gb/s.
Before a movie can be put on bittorrent, it must be edited.
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10 years, maybe 15, and we'll all be on fiber.
1990 called, they want their news back.
I remember the time when fiber was the next big thing (in said 90s). Everyone was anxious, everyone thought it was really great, yeah, sure, it was expensive but give it time and mass production, and after all it's SO DAMN FAST (Gigabit! Absolutely impossible on copper wires!).
It's a bit like that IPv6. Yes, it would be nice, yes, it's a great technology. But companies loathe investments that aren't really, really, REALLY n
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And consider this: IPv6 is a change in software.
IPv6 is only relevant on the internet as a whole, and has a chicken/egg problem. There's no real benefit to itself for a single business switching to ipv6, and the ISPs don't need it if their customers and peers aren't switching.
Businesses do however derive benefit from upgrading the speed of their LANs and therefore are motivated to do so, individually. Hell, I'd buy a 10GB lan for my home office if the price dropped. I upgraded to gigabit a few years ago alr
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Most of our buildings have been wired with fiber to the desktop for the last 4-5 years. Biggest breakdown are the stupid transceivers. Their power supplies go wonky and we can't get just the power supply. Have to swap out entire unit. New machines are coming in with fiber cards but still have older machines with ethernet only.
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"Obsolescent?" Is that like "scrumtrilescent"? (Invented by Will Farrell's James Lipton character on the spot to describe an actor's work.)
Re:More data forces the need for more bandwidth (Score:5, Funny)
+1 Insightful; until now I never truly understood why people wanted more bandwidth.
Re:More data forces the need for more bandwidth (Score:4, Funny)
Warez, pr0n, and MP3's. That's all. Take those away and we might as well be using 300 bps modems.
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You first ;)
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Being able to push more content, move more data, combined with data files being that much larger, is the real driving force behind this push.
Interesting, please subscribe me to your newsletter.
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Linux just isn't ready for the desktop yet. It may be ready for the web servers that you nerds use to distribute your TRON fanzines and personal Dungeons and Dragons web-sights across the world wide web, but the average computer user isn't going to spend months learning how to use a CLI and then hours compiling packages so that they can get a workable graphic interface to check their mail with, especially not when they already have a Windows machine that does its job perfectly well and is backed by a major corporation, as opposed to Linux which is only supported by a few unemployed nerds living in their mother's basement somewhere. The last thing I want is a level 5 dwarf (haha) providing me my OS.
Wait, what? There ARE TRON fanzines? Hummm I must get my Terabyte gear NOW!
Re:Ethernet or Token Ring (Score:5, Informative)
When Token Ring died it was because 100Mbps ethernet was cheaper than 16Mbps token ring. I was there. Token couldn't keep up; case closed.
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It's not dead; It's just resting.
Re:Ethernet or Token Ring (Score:4, Informative)
Many companies should have sticked to Token Ring, so there wouldn't be this slowdown during backups, updates etc. In the end Ethernet is just slow because of the amount of users on the network, they yell for a bigger integer before "bit" instead of changing technology.
Who modded this informative?
You're a moron or in love with token ring. Token ring doesn't magically create bandwidth out of thin air. Even with token ring, the network has a finite, fixed maximum speed and a finite, fixed maximum bandwith.
If you're moving terabytes on the network for big backups, there is less idle capacity on that segment of the network for other traffic, regardless of the network technology (fiber, ethernet, token ring, ATM, MPLS etc.).
Token ring does prevent COLLISIONS, but so do full-duplex ethernet switches. It may be easier to implement QOS and traffic shaping on token ring, but that is a completely different story.
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You're a moron or in love with token ring.
I don't think those two are exclusive of each other.
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While we have retained the ethernet name and frame format CSMA/CD has pretty much gone the way of the dodo (it's supported but virtually never used at gigabit and not supported at all at 10 gigabit)
Token ring gives each device on the ring roughly equal time, I'd imagine switched ethernet with a decent switch would have similar behaviour. I beleive some of them can also prioritise data.
they yell for a bigger integer before "bit" instead of changing technology.
because throwing bandwidth at the problem typical
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Personally my home LAN is outgrowing GigE ...
As would the home LAN of any self-respecting geek. ;-)
On the other hand, let's not lose sight of the fact that outside our basements, things will stay pretty much the same.
ifconfig vr0 | grep media
media: Ethernet autoselect (10baseT/UTP)
As a side note, here in California we can only dream of having basements.
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OK, I'll bite. What are you doing on your home network that you're being hindered by GbE?
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Personally my home LAN is outgrowing GigE
Uhh... seriously, *WTF*. What do you have, a dozen teenage boys streaming HD porn 24 hours a day from a central server or something?
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