Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Technology Stocks : Adaptec (ADPT) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: George Dawson who wrote (1729)	4/22/1998 3:43:00 PM
From: Torben Noerup Nielsen	Respond to of 5944

George, I am fairly sure Gigabit Ethernet is going to be used heavily as a LAN technology in the future when the cost per seat comes down some. But for now, I suspect it is primarily going to be used as an interconnection scheme for multiple Switched Fast Ethernet segments. And you can get the full bandwidth too since you can do Switched Gigabit Ethernet. I wouldn't worry too much about standards and cabling; those will get done in time. Take a look at this from the applications perspective. Right now we have a number of applications that can easily saturate a traditional Ethernet. A quick fix for some situations is transitioning to Switched Ethernet. To get more headroom, you can move to Fast Ethernet or to Switched Fast Ethernet. With Switched Fast Ethernet, you can get a very high data rate; let's just say you could get the full 100 Mbps each way. How much could you do with this? Well, you shouldn't have any problems getting just about any kind of multimedia we now know of stuffed into a 10 Mbps channel and that gives you 10 of those which is pretty good. And by the way, better concentrate on multimedia applications where the data flows directly from the network to your screen as most disk systems out there cannot handle this kind of load. Not unless you go buy a nice little Adaptec Ultra2 SCSI controller and maybe stripe a couple of Seagate Cheetah's :-) It's hard to come up with applications that could actually use Gigabit Ethernet directly. Maybe this will happen in a few years, but I think it will be longer than that. Cheers, Torben