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LAN Turns 30, May Not See 40?
dratcw writes "The first commercial LAN was based on ARCnet technology and was installed some 30 years ago, according to a ComputerWorld article. Bob Metcalfe, one of the co-inventors of Ethernet, recalls the early battles between the different flavors of LAN and says some claims from the Token Ring backers such as IBM were lies. 'I know that sounds nasty, but for 10 years I had to put up with that crap from the IBM Token Ring people — you bet I'm bitter.' Besides dipping into networking nostalgia, the article also quotes an analyst who says the LAN may be nearing its demise and predicts that all machines will be individually connected to one huge WAN at gigabit speeds. Could the LAN actually be nearing the end of its lifecycle?"
Could the LAN actually be nearing the end of its lifecycle?
Yes. All computers in the future will be stand alone and the Interweb will be shut down.
Somewhat interesting article, stupid summary question.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
... the lan isn't going to disappear, at least not in 10 years. Can you imagine IBM, a defense corp, a huge pharma, etc... ditching their lans for wireless? yeah right, not any time soon.
Patriot - A fan of expanding government power and spending while not wanting to pay higher taxes.
there will still be LANS for segmentation and security purposes.
There will always be networks that need to talk to each other, but no way in hell are they going to want to be connected to the outside.
I think he is perhaps alluding to the inevitable fall of LAN to WLAN.
Colin Dean Go a year without DRM
Or at least, they should, but then people do some pretty stupid things sometimes.
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
Don't trust any spec over 40.
wait...
Ice Cream has no bones.
thus business isn't going there.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
I'd say it's going to make 40, especially seeing as we're having such grave difficulties with deploying wireless networks to begin with. I live in an apartment building where everyone has a wireless network and I wish we all didn't. It ends up causing more interference then the campus where there's a WAP every 50 feet! Wireless has to come a long way still and I don't quite see it happening in only 10 years.
"Don't meddle in the affairs of a patent dragon, for thou art tasty and good with ketchup." ~ohcrapitssteve
doesn't matter what you want to call it, two computers connected to a local router/hub is a LOCAL area network.
"Besides dipping into networking nostalgia, the article also quotes an analyst who says the LAN may be nearing its demise and predicts that all machines will be individually connected to one huge WAN at gigabit speeds." Although it would be throwing security out the windows (pun intended), IPv6 could facilitate this giant WAN concept.
Die First, Then Quit
Yes yes, and we'll have flying cars and robots cooking our meals.
Prognosticator didn't used to be a synonym for clueless shithead. Thanks to Dvorak, that has changed, and looking at the clueless shitheads he's spawned.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
From TFA:
Nice caveat..."appropriate security technology"...that one reason is why this move to the "huge WAN" won't be happening anytime soon.
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
Pending some fantastic breakthrough, it will always be cheaper and easier to send lots of data across a small distance than to send lots of data across a long distance. Thus LAN technology will be faster/cheaper and continue to exist.
Security.
Having every machine potentially accessible by every other machine out there is a serious security issue.
Could the LAN actually be nearing the end of its lifecycle?
Not as long as they let me control my own home network...
This guy's the limit!
It's not LAN vs wireless, it's LAN vs WAN.
Running a WAN without using LANs throughout is nonsense. IIRC a WAN is just bridged LANs by definition. Proposing that all the LANs will have one node is just silly.
Typical Bob Metcalfe of recent years. The man has lost it. Granted I haven't bothered reading anything he's written in a few years.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
LANs are still a necessary part of school web filters and organizing computers by room and such.
At home they make LAN parties possible and simplify sharing file without dependence on an active/good internet connection
Let me count the ways:
Infanet
ARCnet
10Net
Appletalk
Token Ring
Ethernet: Thick/thin/UTP/STP/fibre/wireless
AT&ROFLMAO
We call that 'Intranet' nowadays.
My thought exactly. When I first started working for the company I do now, every one of the workstations on campus had a public IP address. And then all of the sudden people started getting Net Send messages for Viagra.
I don't want every computer in the world to be able to see my computer, at least not directly. Perhaps I'm missing a point here but seems to me that as long as there is a need for firewalls, there is going to be a need for LAN's.
Title says it all!
...do NOT miss our ARCnet-wielding overlords.
DIP switches to set the address, and without a list of existing addresses, was a recipe for disaster for fresh installs. In addition it used coax, which some of the older field techs here can probably attest to having seen crimped with pliers. Terminators on both ends.
Bleah.
Yup, it's much better to network today.
Don't tell me to get a life. I'm a gamer; I have LOTS of lives!
As long as there are computer games and booze there will continue to be LAN parties.
Aren't the robots supposed to take over the world soon anyway? -Taylor
Worldwide Military budgets: $2100 billion. Worldwide Space Exploration budgets: $38 billion. Really, world? Really?
LAN will never disappear for one reason... Security.
That's what she said.
The LAN as we knew it, the one ethernet cable going through all rooms and being looped on the wall with a small jumper, is already dead for a long time.
The LAN as we know it, one central switch with a lot of ethernet cables getting out to individual ports in rooms, has been here for ages.
What didn't go away was the local addressing methods for sending data to all hosts (broadcast) and interaction with higher level protocols (ARP for determining the IP address).
The LAN as we are going to know it, a bunch of intercepted central-and-not-so-central switches which put you in the right (V)LAN when you plug in your computer to a random port connected to it, is here also if your organisation requires it, but for smaller organisations this is not really necessary:
and predicts that all machines will be individually connected to one huge WAN at gigabit speeds
You need a gigabit WAN for that to work, not all smaller organisations have the need for this. But yes I have rolled it out for two customers.
bash$
All machines networked together? Does this guy know how businesses use VPNs? Has the adage "If you don't want it known, don't use the phone" been forgotten?
As long as there are secrets to keep, machines will be kept off the big networks, behind firewalls, and completely offline as appropriate. Starry-eyed visions of global networks are outright absurd.
"I think he is perhaps alluding to the inevitable fall of LAN to WLAN."
maybe I missed something, but aren't the last 3 letters of WLAN = LAN? Perhaps the argument should be whether or not it'll be wired or wireless...because I can assure you that my DVR will never have a public address...
"Could the LAN actually be nearing the end of its lifecycle?"
No. The security implications of every single device being connected to one big WAN are obvious.
You feel sleepy. Close your eyes. The opinions stated above are yours. You cannot imagine why you ever felt otherwise.
I was assuming that in my response. I don't see the LAN disappearing in the next 10 years for the simple fact that a WLAN is less secure by its very nature than a LAN. Any corporation or entity with information worth stealing, isn't going to be getting rid of their LANs anytime soon. That would be insane. A LAN can have its access points physically secured and tightly controlled and monitored. You go wireless, and you've created a range where people can not only create their own potential access points, but snoop data broadcast over it. Even if it's encrypted, it can be recorded to be worked on cracking later.
Maybe there's some seriously groundbreaking wireless technology I'm not aware of about to take the IT world by storm, but barring that, I'll put money on the LAN having a long life to come. Certainly at least another 10 years, if not much more.
Patriot - A fan of expanding government power and spending while not wanting to pay higher taxes.
Agreed, a LAN provides security and segregation from the wider networks (e.g. the Internet, other parts of the same company) where you control the points. Direct connect to wire-less or the Internet is probably not the best move. A company may comprise of many LANS, which is quite useful for controlling virus outbreaks, and mis-configured equipment.
Anyone who thinks that wireless everything is the wave of the future has never considered the simple phrase "electromagnetic interference."
Imagine you and your closest 35 neighbors in an apartment complex, all wanted to use one of the 11 available 802.11 channels for your routers... at once...
Funny. I'd been talking about this MiniTruth and Token Ring phenomena with a friend just the other day. Whilst being all corporate, actually had an IBM SE come up to me and tell me that I was risking my [redacted big honkin company] through the advocacy of Ethernet.
Two months later, at a big conference for all True Believers conducted by IBM, actually heard IBM plants in the audience doing the amen corner thing with Greek Chorus of "alas, Ethernet would kill the King" lines.... up to the "802.3 will make it hurt when you pee" level of nonsense.
The fact that a 3745 [burly iron werken] running remotely was actually running on the backup token ring thingie for a month before it fell over and died because the primary ring had never worked [vague memory of route discovery]was, well, pretty f'n sweet.
IBM's always been a great company, seriously, but the LAN wars were not its finest hour.
Verizon: Latin for "poor rural service".
unless every computer is running OpenBSD level of security, i wont trust business-confidential and mission-critical systems lying around a huge global WAN with no firewall to offer some level of protection.
Besides, data requirements will go up, so when our WAN gets to gigabit level speeds, our LAN might approach terabit.
10 years ago we were satisfied with basic web pages and a couple javascripts. currently we're satisfied with AJAX and that low-quality feed from YouTube. 10 years from now we might need high-def 3D virtual reality rendered locally. who knows?
LAN and WAN will both go up in speeds, but the one thing i wont bet on is LAN's demise just yet.
I don't really think the LAN will ever become obsolete. There will always be unmanaged network equipment that is cheaper and higher speed than that which the Internet provider can supply.
For residential with a small number of computers and a relatively unsophisticated network layout (a few computers that do minor file/print sharing, a laptop or two, a game console), yes, the wireless gig connection straight to Internet may be the replacement for the LAN as we know it.
For many in the Slashdot crowd, who have a file server at home with movies, music, VM images, and maybe 3 or 4 computers that use that... then the need for a local network that connects at faster speeds than wireless gig can offer might possibly be a need. I know personally I have a wired gig network at home, and many times I think that it is relatively slow to transfer a gig in a few minutes... imagine if in the future I purchase a 50GB 1080p movie with DRM licensing to watch on 3 authorized devices, download it on my wireless gig Internet connection and it finishes in about half an hour, and store it on my home media center... then I decide to watch it on the TV somewhere else in the house. A half hour copy time (putting streaming and buffering aside for the moment) would be slow, whereas having a 10Gbps or a 1Tbps connection would let me copy it in a minute or two.
Educational institutions, such as colleges, would have even more of a need, as they would have local NAS storage with stored video lectures. All students streaming on a single 1Gbps feed would quickly overload the server. Instead, a 10Gbps or 1Tbps connection on the local network would again be worthwhile.
Companies, such as the US Government, biochemical, or industrial companies, would almost certainly have a need for a LAN, just to keep business practices secret and minimize corporate espionage leaks.
As long as residential ISPs only let you have 1 IP address, there will be LANs. Maybe they will get more generous with IPv6 (yeah right).
You forgot SneakerNet.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Actually most IBM offices do have WLAN access to their intranet, but with authentication and strong encryption (EAP-TLS).
Since the Federation is ok with the Romlulans hearing their encrypted subspace signals then it should be fine to broadcast sensitive information to the entire planet.
The blind march to a fully connected and wired rule is horrifically dependent upon an unknown and unproven set of assumptions in computer science that underpin much of our present security infrastructure. We have not proven that FACTOR is NP-Complete, don't know if P=NP or not, and so, there's absolutely nothing to rule out some future innovation that allows for not only rapid factoring, but possibly even P=NP. There are certainly long odds against this happening, but it could happen, and it seems to me that we ought to be congnizant of the risks that we are taking. A theoretical breakthrough in computer science could render much of cryptography obsolete, and with it the promise of secure messaging and storage on any third party computer.
This is my sig.
What is with the obsession over guessing what any aspect of life is going to be like in X number of years? The fact is, there is an infinite number of events than can happen between now and 2050, and nobody can even begin to imagine how our lives will be molded by then. Come on, modern life as we know it in first world countries has only been around for a couple of decades. Technology hardly even existed 100 years ago. You really think the people of early 20th century knew where we'd be today?
The worst part is, technical minds always base future possibilities based on existing technologies. "LAN vs WLAN". Wow, how narrow-minded that those are the only choices. Having fun with "I wonder if so and so will be like so and so in x years" is fine. But to the technically minded who somehow believe they know where technology's going to land us in more than 10-30 years time, get real. You have no clue. Admit you're not all-knowing, and move on.
Why does mankind seem to always operate in a "we've already learned everything about science and technology" mindset? I mean really, making the assumption that we'll even be using TCP in 50 years is laughable.
Since the rise of switches and demise of hubs, the topological difference between a LAN and a WAN is a lot less important.
In the old days, the concept of "lan segments" actually had meaning. Barring special redundancy features, a flaky device or a kink in the cable could bring down the whole network. Now it typically brings down just the link between two devices.
Now Ethernet is pretty much point-to-point: device-to-switch/router or switch-router to switch/router along a dedicated connection.
The local area network is dead. Long live the world-wide-area-network.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
but COAX shakes it's copper at you and tells you to keep your computer turned on and stay off it's lawn.
Ask not what you can do for your country. Ask what your country did to you
So where's the complete list of Token Ring flaws, deficiencies, short-comings, fud, and the rest?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
As a collector of 40 year old Tektronix oscilloscopes, the only realistic source I have for 93 ohm coax is old ARCnet sites. I scavenge around schools and liquidators looking for spools of the stuff. Found some one day and I was quite happy. I was less happy with the fact it was plenum cable on a spool; the jacket had taken the shape of the spool and the center conductor was copper-plated steel. Not too flexible, even in the 4 feet lengths I needed it.
While the article doesn't really mention IPv6, it is somewhat implied that this is what the computers of the future would use to wirelessly connect to the WAN. Being a student of telecommunications at Sheridan college I'm not entirely conviced that the LAN will ever disappear for a few reasons. NAT is still widely used, and welcomed by companies, its more secure, its well documented, tested and true (Although thats not to say it doesn't have its own problems). That alone convinces me LANs will never disappear. LAN's provide more then just a connection to the internet, they allow the sharing of resources and services to other machines on the same network, resources and services that you may not feel comfortable sharing on the internet. Our Telecommunications course doesn't even touch on IPv6. LAN's will be around in some form or another forever. There will always be a need for sharing internal resources.
That reasoning amounts to expecting every doorway from every room to open onto a major automotive freeway.
... and because even Internet backbones can't handle the load of routing data for everyone's personal networked printers, storage servers, and media terminals.
LANs will survive indefinitely precisely because sometimes your data is just feet or yards away
Can we get a "-1 Wrong" moderation option?
The past 10 years have shown us that WAN security hasn't improved much -- mainly because it's so thorougly dependent on human behavior.
So I doubt that 10 years from now we will have the robust security infrastructure that I need to be comfortable connecting directly to a WAN.
A good case in point is Microsoft: They still distribute their systems with a whole bunch of unnecessary services that listen on various ports, each ready to execute whatever commands are sent to them.
Knowing this, companies are forced into adopting a LAN architecture, so that they have the necessary choke points to insert better security.
In fact, in my company, the trend is to break up the LAN into department-sized mini-LANs to help increase security. If anything, the future trend is likely to be toward MORE usage of LANs to enhance security.
It's one thing to have WLAN access to an intranet, it's another thing to ditch your LAN altogether and make every machine wireless. A WLAN access point to the intranet can be tightly controlled and monitored. You can, for example, make sure that extremely sensitive information can not be accessed through the WLAN. It's one thing to give everyone acces to their email and the ability to print from wireless devices(though even email could be at risk), it's another thing to let people access the crown jewels of the companies most sensitive data via wireless. I would be very surprised if that was the case at IBM.
Patriot - A fan of expanding government power and spending while not wanting to pay higher taxes.
According to Wikipedia the first writable floppy came out in '72.
I guess if you count code printouts handed around to be retyped, sneakernet is even older.
By contrast, sneaker-less inter-computer email dates back to at least 1966 and was one of the earliest popular applications of the ARPANET, the precursor to today's Internet.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Until WAN routers are cheap and reliable, it won't happen. I've had the same $30 Netgear router I've had for 5 years without any issues. My Belkin wireless router can't go a day without being unreliable. The Mac Mini had a hard time connecting to web-sites until we switched from wireless to LAN.
When you need 100% uptime you can go with a $30 router or spend significantly more than that for a wireless router and network card that won't ever drop your connection.
I'll keep my wires thank you very much.
Work Safe Porn
There's nothing more to say to you until you get that one, crucial point: Firewalls do not have to be NATs, and NATs don't have to firewall. And you need a firewall whether or not you have a NAT.
Once you do, understand that NAT is a brutally ugly hack. It's much easier and more powerful to simply be able to open a firewall port than to have to forward ports.
And you do need a firewall on your computer -- that, or just turn services off. If you don't do one of the two, wireless will bite you someday.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
It's not LAN vs wireless, it's LAN vs WAN.
I got the WAN part, but for some reason, when I read it the first time I got wireless in my head. Weird. My argument still stands for the same reasons. That would be crazy to put your most sensitive data on a server directly connected to one big WAN shared by everyone.
Patriot - A fan of expanding government power and spending while not wanting to pay higher taxes.
And 802.11n will only make things worse. Each user will be taking up 3 (or is it just 2?) wide channels! I know 5Ghz is part of the 802.11n spec, but I wonder if most people will unknowingly default to 2.4Ghz... What a nightmare.
We have a satellite building where I was able to detect 50... yeah, that's right, *50*, other 802.11b/g APs with iStumbler. Sometimes I just want to find the person who decided it woudl be a good idea to allocate 11 *overlapping* channels for 802.11b and punch them in the face.
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
you're right. When you think about it, the amount of electromagnetic and same spectrum interference can only go up from here really. My limit is one disconnect or five packets delayed more than 1000 milliseconds PER MONTH or I'm continously pissed at anything wireless. And living next to a huge power transformer station...well let's just say I run a 50 foot cable through my house now. LAN is never going to die in favor of wireless. The fastest way to get a news broadcast with no delay from the other side of the world is fiber under the ocean and that's never going to change.
Google's Super Secret Search Algorithm: SELECT @search_results FROM internet WHERE @search_results = 'good'
Yes, because having all the machines of your business connected to THE WAN makes perfect security sense.
Leonard Nimoy, nude and in character
you're confusing two different concepts, as I understand he argues the LAN as we know it, aka machines talking to some form of gateway or internal server will go away in favor of an "all internet" connectivity. What is not the same as replacing wired LAN with a wireless architecture that still maintains a local net.
I'm aging rapidly, I bought a new game and had no idea if my machine was good for it.
I woul love to see the MAC lookup tables on one of those world wide switches. it makes complaining about the unrelated jumbo frame buffers seem like small potato.
But yes long live the World Wide LAN, and the new SAN Stelar area network.
People who think a LAN is just a cheap way of sharing an Internet connection across many heterogeneous hosts don't understand what a LAN is and why you would have one. Not all computers are fancy web surfing terminals.
Additionally, the Internet is often used simply to link multiple LANS or.. a WAN.. or a MAN. This has lead to the rise of the DAN, FAN, STAN, PLAN, TAN and unfortunately the KLAN.
These debates are often really disguised debates about the present, about what technology or practise in the present is the best. By arguing that such-and-such will dominate in the future, you are really making a statement about its quality or promise in the present, which is what matters to you. It's a form of appeal to authority argument, where the "authority" in this case is future history. (If X dominates in the future, it must be that X is the superior technology or practise.) It's a slightly different form of the argument that appeals to use by more successful organizations or countries. (If X is used by company/country Y, whom we all know to be successful, then it must be that X is the superior technology or practise.)
Not to mention those wireless LANs (yes, they're still a LAN!) have to connect back to wired at some point.
And once you get into a large corporation or datacenter, LANs, VLANs, and subnets multiply, they don't shrink.
I don't know what kind of crack I was on, but I suspect it was decaf.
Lets just look at one office building. A few years ago the average was 800 network devices in a single building, with the number steadily rising. A network device can be anything from a computer to a network printer. Even a VOIP phone system can count these days, as well as video conferencing equipment.
Just to keep TRACK of all this stuff everything will be segmented onto a number of virtual LANs. After all, many of these things DON'T need to be shared. Why should you be able to print something out on a corporation's printer when you can't even get into that part of the building? It's just a security risk.
It is a well known fact that the best way to secure a computer is to leave it unplugged from the Internet. Once you open that door you have a whole new set of problems. This is no different. To protect the network you are better of isolating it. However, Internet connections DO have their uses in business so you want to be able to put in a door.
This virtual doorway to the rest of the virtual world works just like a real door to the rest of the real world. The whole point is to create a chokepoint where security can make sure only the 'allowed traffic' gets through. By putting each one to an individual 'Net connection you are opening a whole mess of worms for no added benefit.
Real world analogy would be comparing the current network infrastructures to walled cities of the dark ages. The walls are great at keeping most annoyances away. The only thing you have to really worry about is those rare handful of people who will try to break in on their own with say a grappling hook to scale the wall and get in (read: 'hackers') or neighboring towns (read: other corporations, so corporate espionage). To deal with those you need other tools, such as your own personal army.
Continuing the analogy, if you take away the city walls (eg the LAN) the town becomes more a part of the world (WLAN) but now your guards and army (network admins and their teams) will be spending more time dealing with new problems created by it such as various forms of scavengers or bandits (hackers) that wouldn't of had the resources to deal the city walls if you had kept them.
Until you can prove conclusively that we are better off without LANs, you are going to have LANs. They are easier to maintain, familiar, and shield networks from a whole lot of potential problems that they wouldn't need to deal with so long as they are on a LAN.
In all likelihood wired local networks will continue to be useful for a long time. Among other things, the fact that the link is tangible makes it good for risk management. Want it disconnected? Unplug the cable. Under those circumstances, there's nothing software can do to re-establish the connection. Likewise, physical security of a data link is much easier to establish if the link is tangible. Home users aren't likely to care about this but corporate users probably will.
Beyond that, as long as tangible links are faster than wireless links, and as long as an increase in the physical density of wireless links decreases the overall availability of the network to each client, wired links will continue to be advantageous.
Bow-ties are cool.
I maintain networks for several customers for all the "wireless is cheaper to deploy" crap I keep hearing I've discovered that the pain and cost of putting in cat5e/cat6 can pay for itself within the first two years just counting the service cost of me having to constantly come in and debug why xx machine can't connect or why everything is dog slow.
Meanwhile I'm happy with my cat6 install in my apartment. I have every machine in the house wired except the bathroom and it works flawlessly.
The only speed issue I have is the fact that XBMC would have been much happier if the Xbox had come with a gigabit network interface rather than 100mbps.
One day I'm sure I'll have a fiber optic cable coming into my house, but am I going to connect every machine in the house to its own fiber optic cable? What's going to distribute that high speed connection to all the machines in my house? The blogosphere?
I suppose you can make an argument that every machine will be addressable from the public network with its own IPv6 address, and thus they're all part of one big happy network. You're still going to have a firewall in between your machines and the rest of the network, though.
and get encryption from router to node in order to prevent exposure.
LANs are not going away.
They're getting "stealth" techniques.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
LAN = Local Area Network
/. crowd would mess that up...
WAN = Wide Area Network
I can't believe that of all places, the
The DVR is one of the most logical computers to have a public address in the home. Think of the possibilities if every DVR acted as a bittorrent node.
Cost is as big or a bigger factor than security. So long as ISP's charge by the connection or pipe, businesses and any users with multiple computers will always have an incentive to use a LAN on a single connection or pipe. LAN's will get faster, and wireless connections will achieve greater penetration, but they will still be LAN's.
I once worked for Intergraph, a company that still exists but was a pioneer in the CAD/CAM workstation arena. They had their own internal LAN network system called 'Internet'. Not to be confused with today's internet... This was a 1 Mbit system that let VAX 730/750/780 back-end systems interconnect.
To Terminate, or not to Terminate, that's the question - SCSIROB
The thought of just the ARP traffic alone is a bit staggering.
Seriously, in a corp that big, your machines need to be as secure as if they were on the internet anyway. You can't and won't secure that much cable, building and personnel.
I think LANs will continue to exist out of sheer practicality though. What's easier, wiring up every computer in the building to the internet, or wiring the building computers together and then getting internet to one of them?
I am trolling
I wonder what this "analyst" actually knows about networking and network security... Probably just another futures snake-oil salesman.
We're just going to put everything naked out on the public Intarweb tubes thingee and do it WIRELESSLY?
I have two words for that idea.
MY ASS!
Why the hell would any sane (and even most of the insane) network administrations trade centralized threat management control for redundant controls on each and every box? I mean, yeah, the power is there to do that. But for Bob's sake WHY? Common wisdom is to SHRINK your attack surface area. Not MULTIPLY it. And at update time, instead of pushing one patch, once, you have to push one patch n-times?
And why in the name of Bob would you do this wirelessly? What the hell was he smoking when he thought this up? Sure, there may be more secure wireless implementations down the road than the primitive stuff we have now. But THINK! Do you REALLY want to be blasting your traffic to any and everyone with a receiver? At least with a wired solution, they have to take the trouble to locate you on the network first, then take the trouble to capture packets.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
No wireless WAN will never completely replace wired LAN systems anytime soon. I think someone's forgetting that wireless networks basically have this problem that all signals are shared in the same airspace while if you use a wire, it's isolated in the wire. So wires will always carry more data / speed than wireless ever will. Need more speed? Toss in another wire, whereas in wireless you soak up more of the spectrum which is limited.
Appended to the end of comments you post. 120 chars.
After reading through endless fields of stupidity, I've adopted a policy of ignoring people who make outrageous, yet unsubstantiated claims about technology y while casually associating these outlooks with irrelevant quantities of x.
If you're going to predict the death of the most ubiquitous layer 2 technology, you damn well better have something more to present than "In the future we'll all be on the Internet directly and it'll be like really fast". What relevance does a pointless and, quite frankly, ignorant claim like "gigabit speeds" have to do with the death of Ethernet?
If you have any more vague, unsubstantiated predictions to make, let me know so that I can skip reading slashdot and consult a fortune cookie for my daily news instead.
Well, Token-Ring did have one interesting feature, which was on the other hand poorly implemented as all the rest: an hermaphroditic (or gender-neutral) connector. Each connector would mate with another connector of the exact same shape, rotated in the opposite direction. That would make cable extensions trivial, never having to worry whether you needed a male-male, female-female, or male-female cable: they were all identical! The nice concept was, sure enough, poorly executed; the connectors required additional plastic inserts to keep the thing together, as the two connectors would easily unfasten otherwise. But at least the basic concept was interesting, I used to think at the time. For an example of the way it worked see Wikipedia.
Notably, Token-Ring was not much worse, on a mechanical level, than Ethernet at the time: the latter required either a thick coaxial network cable with a clumsy external transceiver box and a further thick cable (AUI drop cable) before reaching the actual network card, or a thinner coaxial cable, again with a similar external box and a drop cable. Later, the spread of 10BaseT and the disappearance of the external transceiver box rapidly made networking a much simpler affair, and Ethernet quickly became ubiquitous.
And, for the record, Apple briefly had a Token-Ring option as well at the time, a special (incredibly large and expensive) NuBus Token-Ring card was produced by Apple: the TokenTalk NB.
Plus, due to the "sue happy" mentality that exists in the United States of America these days I would not put it past someone to break the wireless encryption on their [insert medical field here] office and borrow their personal data and several other patients. Then simply "find" their data out on the 'net and identify it as coming from that particular health provider's office. Bingo! Sue for the maximum and not worry about working anymore - or not as much anyway.
May seem far fetched, but in the times we live it could easily happen. So, wired networks only for the health care/medical field. They can be listened in on, sure, but it is a damn sight harder than it is to tumble a wireless network and setup a laptop to crack it from nearby while sipping a latte. Basically, LANs are going nowhere for the foreseeable future.
Dream as if you'll live forever.
Live as if you'll die tomorrow.
~Anonymous~
...is an idiot douchebag. He may have once had some spark of technical genius in him back in the 1970's, but once he became a PHB, his mind turned to mush. If you recall, he once claimed that the Internet was going to implode in the late 1990's and that when Windows 2000 was released it would destroy Linux completely. He hates Linux and open source stuff with a passion.
You gotta wonder if he's been drinking too many of those printed paper milkshakes and the toxins in the ink have affected him.
All the arguments I am seeing here are missing the mark because they buy into the premise that only computers connected via Ethernet represent a LAN. A LAN is just a group of computers connected together in relatively close physical proximity, as in within a room, building, campus, etc. Wireless networks CAN BE and usually ARE a type of LAN! LANs are NOT defined by the technology used to build them. I think to predict the death of the LAN is downright silly because the LAN is more of a conceptual view of a group of networked hosts rather than a specific technology, protocol, etc, and killing and idea is a pretty tough proposition. As long as it remains useful to treat a bunch of machines connected in close proximity as a unit for whatever purpose, we will have LANs.
A little non-sense now and then is relished by the wisest men. -Willy Wonka
I have 14 most of the time. 4 for the kids, two for me, two as pvr, two laptops, a server and a dev server, one for my wife, one in a studio.
I'm not anti-social, I'm anti-idiot.
6. Profit!!! But yeah, it seems like there needs to be a disclaimer under this article, especially the fact that WAN is not a Wireless Annoyance Network.
From the article:
The next step is to give each machine a direct Internet connection, with appropriate security technology, skipping the LAN, he predicted.
"The two major barriers are performance and reliability," Whiteley noted.
That "appropriate security technology" isn't even on the horizon, and given the rate of major Windows releases I'm going to say "within 10 years" is flat out wrong. Even 20 years is hard to imagine, because some LANs provide nearly complete physical separation.
What no ATM network? (That would be Asynchronous Transfer Mode, not any kind of banking machine)
A dozen years ago the "experts" were predicting that the LAN would be replaced by an ATM WAN...
--z (who suffered the pain of implementing "LAN Emulation" on ATM)
In Soviet Russia, the Beowulf cluster imagines you!
The carriers, AT&T in particular, have this view of the world. It's not wireless LAN they are talking about (that's still a LAN after all), it's public cellular data type services. The way AT&T views the future, a company will outsource its entire LAN to the carrier, who will service everyone with cell towers and microcells. Each device will be assigned to a "LAN" that belongs to the company - it's basically a big nationwide VLAN per customer. It is kind of an interesting idea - you can roam all over the country and your laptop/phone/etc. stays connected to your corporate network everywhere you go. No more VPN, no more wireless hotspots. Security would be handled by the network. The network admin's job inside a company would be to manage the outsourced service.
Personally, I have some issues with how we can get public networks up to the required level of performance, but hey, I'm not a physicist.
Yes, Bob Metcalfe, all the way to the year 2000.
:) I don't know who ran the cable, but I was very impressed with the achievement.
I'll make a bold statement- if the Ethernet switch could not have existed for some reason, Ethernet would be all but gone by now.
Ethernet is awesome, but without switches (or routers), all interfaces share a common bus. If 2 stations try to "talk" at the same time, a collision results, and they both have to try again. The more stations and traffic, the more collisions, the more retries, the more collisions, and it can saturate and become a third-world parliment fight.
Fiber networks are rings like Token ring. Token ring by definition has no collisions. One station is designated a master and sends out a token. You can only talk if you have the token, so token ring nets can use essentially 100% of the bandwidth. Extremely efficient and deterministic. However, if a station breaks, or the cable is pulled, the ring is BROKEN. Big nightmare.
IBM made very solid Token ring stuff- even had these great connector blocks with self-shorting connectors that kept the ring intact if you pulled out a station. But it was very pricey, so it went the way of the Betamax- technically better, but cost (much) too much more. Even with the old "thinnet", "T's", 50 ohm terminators, poorly crimped and flaky BNC connectors, Ethernet was cheaper and worth the many hassles. (Coming from a radio/analog electronics background, I had no problem with BNC splices, but I've seen some horribly crushed coax- some that still worked!)
When UTP (unshielded twisted pair) came out (1990ish), mass wiring got easier and telco people could install it reliably. But it could not, and still can't, be run more than 100 meters (in spec- of course there is good safety margin in the spec and you'll get longer runs to work fine.) I worked for a company where we literally strung a thinnet coax down the street to link 2 of our buildings. It was over 1000', as I recall, and with 2 lightning arrestors and 2 media converters, it worked perfectly.
When Ethernet switches came out, you could divvy up traffic much more easily than using routers, and when switches got really cheap, well, token ring is long gone.
Now with 10Gbit Ethernet (wow!!), switches, and trunking (parallel Ethernet paths), Ethernet bandwidth is keeping up nicely.
No wireless or WAN can come close to competing with the cost / bandwidth for local networks.
Fiber can be pricey, but is reasonable enough and great for interconnecting large campuses.
For me the bottom line is that if I relied on someone else's network, like a Comcast, Verizon, etc., and something broke, I have to rely on them to fix it. And I don't like that scenario. I want control of my realm, and I don't want a tech rep. from a Verizon telling me the problem is with my system when I know it's not.
So for direct control and management reasons, I want as much Ethernet and Fiber ring as possible, and only use WAN (VLAN, frame relay, leased line, etc.) where I can't string a cable down the street, or use a microwave link.
I personally don't believe it. There will always be some kind of "LAN", even if everything is interconnected. Especially the longer we use IP4--there simply aren't enough IP addresses for all the devices. Internal IPs must be used. But even if we think simpler then that--a WAN is made up of multiple LANs. Each building must have its own LAN or wireless access point to interface with the WAN. There are tons of other reasons that simply having one big WAN (like every device having its own IP), like network security. Gosh, even having your network printer freely accessible on the internet. You can't just block that out easily... I remember the days back in middle school where every PC in the school had its own static IP live on the internet. How times have changed!
ArcNet - Proprietary(DataPoint) 1Mbps - token passing protocol via bus topology on coax
Token Ring - IEEE 802.5 - 4/16 Mbps - token passing protocol on star wired ring topology on SPT/UTP
Ethernet - IEEE 802.3 - CSMA/CD - 10Base5 Thicknet(500 meters) - 10Base2 thinnet (185meters) 4 repeater rule - 10Bt, 100Bt, 1000Bt (100m)
FDDI - ANSI X3T9.5 - Token passing protocol - ring topology on fiber - Supported UTP
ATM - ATM Forum - SONET physical layer - Ring/Star topology - uses OC-X speeds and feeds - 25mbps copper spec
And the LAN winner is Ethernet because of simplicity, scalability, installed base and cost. Other technologies such as ATM were so much more superior and elegant but too complex and costly for most IT shops.
I think the thought process is this: 20 years ago it would have been inconceivable that most people would have their own cell phones and many people would be ditching their land lines. It's a rough, but fair analogy. I still don't think it'll happen, but it's an interesting concept.
-Arthur
Cave ne ante ullas catapultas ambules
As long as laws like HIPAA exist, medical offices, dental offices, chiropractor offices, psychiatrist offices and many others in the same fields will not change over to wireless. I firmly believe that even with the advances in wireless encryption and a greater focus on security, wireless offices in the medical field (especially those in dense city regions) should not be installed.
I install and support computer systems in private doctor and dental practice offices as part of my business specialty. I am also a CISSP specializing in security for my medical clients. There's nothing in HIPPA or anything in "acceptable computer security practices" that keeps you from using wireless as long as you secure it with reasonable measures such as WPA2 with strong (e.g. EAP-TLS) authentication and AES-128 or better encryption. That pretty much renders the WiFi connections uncrackable without using super extraordinary hacking firepower and techniques.
I used to be as paranoid about wireless as you seem to be, but once I educated myself thoroughly about it, I now know better that with *properly secured WiFi* (both proper authentication and encryption methods utilized) that the only real security hazard left is DoS'ing the WLAN with RF interference. Stealing data itself from such a WLAN has become excruciatingly difficult to achieve.
Ever been to a big city's giant hospital complex such as MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston? The ceilings of every hallway, office area, nurses' stations, patient room clusters, reception areas, conference rooms, even the cafeterias are bristling with Cisco 1240AG boxes and antennas. Their network admins know their stuff too. Wireless security is not a problem there. Wireless networking is a crucial technology in such a place, providing such immediate flexibility for workstation and printer deployments that their flow of automated information handling would suffer greatly without it if they had to go back to hardwired network drops only.
Pretty soon my computer will be informing me that it 'is Borg, resistance is futile'
...from people that do not unserstand how tese things work. The LAN is not about technology. It is about hierachical organization, proplem encapsulation and cost. These factors will not go away, wery likely not ever.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Yes, of course ! How do you think that they'll enforce even more stupid forms of DRM (that will force RMS to counter writing even more complex versions of GPL) ?
And how do you think that de government will spy on you, using the RFID tag reader in your fridge and fine you if you don't buy the mandatory 10% corn-based products required by some law that some lobby pushed ?
In 10 years, even tinfoil hats will be network-enabled.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Could the LAN actually be nearing the end of its lifecycle?
Is the free beer gone?
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
And none of them offer faster transfer rates than a station wagon full of tapes.
A LAN is a wired local network. Like at your home.
A WAN is a wired network that spans beyond a single building (ie a wired connection between several buildings across the city).
A wireless network that your thinking of is a WLAN (Wireless Local Area Network). Think "wireless home network".
Existing LANs are faster than existing WANs. Ethernet runs at 10 Gbps and can be channel-bonded up to 100 Gbps. Infiniband runs within the same range. What's more, long-distance Ethernet and Infiniband are possible today, making it far more economic and far more practical to replace WANs with one gigantic LAN than the other way round. There simply isn't any sense in running a T3 or T4 down residential streets, when Japan already provides gigabit ethernet links to each home.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
If you want to call wireless technology a form of LAN technology, then the LAN doesn't really go away, does it? Designations like LAN, WAN, MAN are all kind of arbitrary. Where I work, we've got a 100Mb ethernet connection to TimeWarner's piece of the backbone. So, our web servers go from ethernet to ethernet to Internet. The only boundaries that seem to have substantive transitional meaning are the BGP ones from the point of view of the Internet. If you want to call what you have on your side of the boundary a LAN or a MAN or a non-LAN wireless LAN, go for it. If you have an ethernet connection to your ISP and think that means your wireless LAN isn't a LAN, fine.
As for wireless interference, the FCC will have to regulate any frequencies before they can be considered reliable enough for profit-motive servers to run on. The current 2.4Ghz is way too bespectacled with every fun gadget from phones to cameras to be considered on par with wires. And, no matter what you do, wireless will always be seen in the eyes of finance security types as less secure than wires.
The one scenario in which the LAN might be unrecognizable from its current form might be if the Internet ran on a global wireless mesh. A cool concept, but impractical in many ways - oceans aren't distance friendly and such a large scale mesh could be a routing behemoth dwarfing the measly 240,000 entry Internet routing table.
"We are all geniuses when we dream"
- E.M. Cioran
My first reaction was "what an idiot" and "how could local area networks every go away?", but then I started to think about IPv6 and the gradual lack of need for NAT. Eventually, (nearly) every networked machine will have it's own IP and NAT won't be needed; meaning they're all part of a WAN. Sure, whole chucks of the WAN will be in secured space behind a firewall but they're still part of the WAN. Which will probably just be thought of as the Global Network or just The Network at some point.
In short eventually we'll end up with one massive global network with sections of secured off.
Of course there's still good reason to have privately connected machines that have absolutely no access to the Internet. For this reason alone, LANs will cease to exist. However, I do think they'll be come specialized and much, much less common than they are today.
- I voted for Nintendo and against Bush
...probably doesn't need a LAN today. They wirelessly connect to their .Mac iDisk or use the "Back to My Mac" feature in Leopard to transfer files from one computer to another over the WAN. It all mounts the same way as a local share, so what does the early-adopting casual user care?
Future businesses and power users won't abandon LANs because they need them. Casual users of the future, though, might just.
Your mind is clear / The things that you fear / Will fade with how much you / Believe what you hear
There are two very hard reasons that LANs will continue to exist and they will be wired.
The speed of light
In one clock cycle light travels less than a foot. (1Ghz+) For every foot further your signal travels you have to wait at least another nanosecond. If the hub is twenty feet away that's not too bad, if it's 2000 feet or twenty miles away you may have a problem.
Broadcast vs. Point to point
When one host is talking on a broadcast medium (like wifi) it blocks out every other host within range. If a hundred shielded point to point links can be put in the same space you have a hundred times the available bandwidth.
And also
And this is before you even think about security, denial of service (jamming), radio interference, limited wavelength allocations and optic fibres.
I agree. I think the only place you might see wired networks disappear is in the home of the average person. Even though wireless networks will be faster, they'll still be slower than wired. Not to mention the fact that wired are more reliable than wireless.
qwerty
I can only hope people grow up enough to not post nonsense like this article after all I want to buy a 48-port 10/100/1000/10000/100000 managed ethernet switch from Circut city for $200 (Inflation adjusted) in ten years from now and if everyone keeps replying to this crap on slashdot rather than doing their jobs it just isn't going to happen.
Yes, by the year 2020, there will be no LANs left on the planet. A giant switch is about to be built by the NSA at a secret locale somewhere in the Pacific (or maybe in Texas, it hasn't quite been decided yet) and all computers on Earth will be plugged into it, as required by U.S. law. It will be known as the Bailwick of Information George Bush Response Operations Technical Hub and E-formation Repository. It will do for the internet what we (the U.S.) has done for terrorism reduction, economic prosperity, and New Orleans. It will be awesome. It is what IPv6 is all about. Doesn't anyone ever read the Documentation!?
Perhaps I've said too much.
Think of the implications when certain "home videos" get pilfered.
LAN will never go away.
In some form or another, we will always (as we should) segregate hosts based on their relationship to us.
Traditionally, that relationship has been physical location. Now we have VPNs and VLANs, which are extensions of the LAN.
I don't want my machines seeing other machines on the internet in the same way they see each other.
Anyone who says we should all join hands and hop on the internet together is an idiot.
It's equivalent to someone at a party saying "Everybody! Everybody get naked. Come on, don't be shy. It's going to be great."
If you read the article carefully, you will find that the wacky statements about the LAN disappearing came from Robert Whiteley, an analyst at Forrester Research Inc., not Bob Metcalfe. The article's writer, Lamont Wood, pieced his story together from many sources. So, as you have stated, it is instead Mr. Whiteley who has "lost it".
You are correct that the article seems to confuse "wireless" with "WAN" and erroneously uses the phrases interchangeably.
A WAN connection by itself will never be more secure than a LAN hooked to a WAN, and a wireless connection will never be more reliable than a wired connection, all things being equal.
127.0.0.1 :)
... control what WILL and what WON'T become the next generation of consumer technology. And we all know that the next generation of consumer technology will have a major emphasis on copyright protection and be laden with DRM. LAN and TCP/IP are going to be phased out in favour of a more "monitorable" technology.
We're observing the current phasing out of dvd in favour of blu-ray right now. They will put it down to consumer demand, but in truth it's investor's demand of the regaining of control, that's seeing these changes take place. There was no actual choice between HD-DVD and blu-ray. Both are ridden with DRM.
One giant (monitorable) WAN would suit them just fine.
Geez, what a bunch of whiners... 16 Mbps Token Ring was vastly superior to 10 and 100 Mbps Ethernet, especially before switching became popular.
Officially a geek since 1984
Well, when someone works out how to make a physical layer that can fairly arbitrate between all the devices on the planet then you might be right.
But, as usual, the analyst/reporter combination ends up with a statement that includes a profound misuse of terminology. The statement might be correct if you replace "LAN" with "ethernet over copper for the PC".
Practically, one will always have "LANs" because there will always be a localisation of the physical layer and there will always be a need to seperate serial numbers from subscriber numbers and application identfiers. What the analyst actually proposed was automated loadbalancing over multiple, local, wireless LANs owned and operated by ISPs/telcos, rather than using a single, owner/operated LAN.
Trouble is, if you phrase it like that, there's no headline. So move along folks, ain't nothing happening here.
-- Butlerian Jihad NOW!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
It doesn't make any sense to be 'connected directly to the Internet' without being on a LAN. What is this the future computer's local routing domain? Can it only communicate with one router, and nothing else (essentially a wireless point-to-point link)? That would seem pretty inefficient when there are lots of computers/printers/etc within the organization that would like to communicate. Any other configuration, and you have a LAN again.
That analyst seems to be taking the 'internet cloud' metaphor far too literally. The internet is a network made up of smaller networks; wherever you attach to it, you're on a smaller, local network. There isn't some magical boundary that you can pass and just be 'directly connected to the internet' without being on a local net of some sort.
No matter how many terabits of data you can cram through a cable per second, there will always be a need for low-latency. A planet-wide star topology network, without the many levels of hierarchy we have today, would have latency that would be completely unacceptable for a great many applications. As long as our communication is subject to the speed of light, we will have LANs.
There's no failure quite as dissatisfying as a complete and total solution to the wrong problem.
Among the major barriers are performance, reliability, scalability and security....
On a subnote, can any UK resident imagine taking Richard Whiteley seriously as a network guru?
One swallow does not a fellatrix make
You've obviously never been to a good orgy :P
Oh, wait, this is /.
One swallow does not a fellatrix make
My prediction is: Not in a 100 years.
People above mention security as a reason.
That might be one reason.
However, for professional use, the current wireless speeds are really too slow. There will always remain applications that are content with wired speeds, and not with wireless speeds.
There is a technical reason that wireless is harder to get high speeds on: If you do wireless, 99% of the transmitted energy goes places where it is of no use to the receiver. On a longish cat5 cable, you might lose 50%, but the other 50% actually makes it to the receiver!
The current situation is that 54Mbit wireless is dirt cheap. And way above the WAN connection that most homes have. That won't change, so most home users will, upon the next upgrade, switch to wireless.
Roger.
Of course not. What a rediculous statement. I don't WANT any of the 5 (sometimes 6) machines I have at home subject to possible wireless attacks, I want them hardwired into a secure network. What idiot comes up with these ideas, marketing guys at wifi hardware manufacturers?
* gigabit speeds seem fast now, but for LAN traffic they'll start looking slow pretty soon. What will we be needing more than a gigabit to the desk for? I don't know... centralized disk farms with diskless workstations? I just know that "if you build it, they will come".
* Whatever they use >gigabit for, latency will make people concerned about every extra router.
* And they'll need it to be there just to keep the system running. They won't want the desktop coming down just because FLAG got cut again.
* See what everyone else has been saying about security.
"Offtopic"... yeah fucking right.
Slashdot's own wikipedia trolls attack for the sig. I get the abusive admin message loud and clear, wikifucks.
ARCNet is still alive and well doing. It's used in areas where precise timing is important and you'd like to have LAN-like networks. For example quite a bit of TV studio equipment has ARCNet to communicate.
For example this controll panel for video cameras http://www.ikegami.com/br/products/hdtv/mcp200.html has ARCNet connectors.
Never will I read an article before commenting. Much less read it carefully.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
I doubt this highly. In a corporate environment, where everything must be secure, there must be absolutely no chance ever of snooping. If anything, fibre for LAN and SAN will continue. Just as with CPU advances, as systems get smaller and denser, cable runs will get shorter and there will be less LAN to speak of, but it will still be there. At some point it will just be considered another system bus that connects with fibre.
"Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart, he dreams himself your master."
It's Simpsons quote (not verbatim).