#8217;s internetworking technologies, as well as such technologies such as IP-specific switching and Layer 3 switching, are fully compatible with Gigabit Ethernet, just as they are with Ethernet and Fast Ethernet. Gigabit Ethernet is available in a full duplex repeater (with the accompanying low cost per port) as well as on LAN switches and routers.Today, Ethernet networks are rapidly approaching the reliability level associated with their telephone ancestors, and are relatively simple to understand and administer. The development of Gigabit Ethernet extends the scalability of Ethernet even further. Now Ethernet scales from 10 to 100 to 1000 Mbps. There has been a rapid overall decrease in the per-port price for Fast Ethernet and Ethernet products, and for shared hub ports, the difference between their costs is narrowing. Over time, Gigabit Ethernet per port costs can be expected to experience similar price decreases.First introduced in 1985, the Token Ting evolution got underway in 1989 when the first 16mbps Token Ting adapter arrived. Token Ring switching later arrived in 1995 providing high speed backbone connectivity between rings and enabling servers to benefit from dedicated full duplex 16 Mbps connections. In his 1998 research paper “High Speed Token Ring”, Martin Taylor explains that Token Ting switches provide high speed backbone connectivity between multiple 4 or 16 Mbps rings. Servers can be connected directly to the switch, benefiting from a dedicated 16 Mbps link, which eliminates the need for shared bandwidth. These dedicated links can run in full duplex mode, providing a clear transmission channel in both directions at the same time without noise. However, since the maximum speed currently supported on Token Ring is 16 Mbps, orgainzations are forced to look to other technologies if they want a solution for “inter-switch” links and for high speed server connections. Higher speed technologies...
