Is MRVC a jags?:
HILLSBORO, Ore. -(Dow Jones)- Intel Corp. Wednesday announced that a
number of high-tech heavyweights including International Business
Machines Corp. and Compaq Computer Corp. have begun shipping Intel's
so-called gigabit Ethernet technology as part of their products.
Gigabit Ethernet is a sizzling market. Several smaller players have
been snapped up by big companies. The technology allows computers to
exchange data at 100 times the speed of conventional networks without
costing a great deal more money, experts say. So many gigabit Ethernet
start-ups have emerged, nearly two dozen at last count, that a slang
term has popped up in Silicon Valley - JAGS, or just another gigabit
start-up.
A quantum leap in communications speed is considered essential to
make high-quality video and other sophisticated multimedia effects
commonplace on the Internet and in corporate networks. The attention to
gigabit Ethernet is a sharp about-face for the industry, which until
last year seemed to have settled on a different way to supercharge
networks.
Most corporations now use the 15-year-old Ethernet system, which has
a maximum speed of 10 million bits, or megabits, a second. An updated
version, known as "Fast Ethernet," runs at 100 megabits a second and is
gaining acceptance at many companies as its costs drop. Gigabit
Ethernet, by comparison, offers another tenfold improvement, to one
billion bits a second. That speed once was considered impossible using
the basic data-transmission format of Ethernet. It was widely assumed
that the networking industry would be forced to abandon Ethernet and
move instead to a format called ATM.
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