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New Ethernet Standard — Both 40 and 100 Gbps
Artemis recommends a blog entry that does a nice job of summarizing the history and current state of the Higher Speed Study Group and the IEEE's next-generation Ethernet standard. "When IEEE 802.3ba was originally proposed [there] were multiple possible speeds that were being discussed, including 40, 80, 100, and 120Gbps. While there options were eventually narrowed down to just two, 40 and 100Gbps, the HSSG had difficulties [deciding] on the one specific speed they wanted to become the new standard... [T]wo different groups formed, one which wanted faster server-to-switch connections at 40Gbps and one which wanted a more robust network backbone at 100Gbps... Unable to come up with a consensus the HSSG decided to standardize both 40Gbps and 100Gbps speeds..."
>Yep, Token Ring was indeed more efficient. Good luck reviving it.
Token Ring (spitting) was only more efficient as compared to the original ethernet specification, with all of its collisions. Once we went to a switched architecture and reduced all conversations to two participants that advantage evaporated.
Remember this, being deterministically bad is still bad. Have you ever been on a ring with > 200 nodes? Don't.
Ethernet won because it was cheap. It beat token ring to switching. It beat everything else to get to 100Mbps. Now with 1Gbps and 10Gbps firmly entrenched in the market I look forward to deploying 100Gbps links.
Ethernet is (and was) better.
Dennis Dumont
P.S. I've already scavenged all of my lobe cables for their copper.