Ethernet standards

[albatros]

Is it correct to assume that what makes an ethernet standard faster than another is the technology of the NICs?

[Whyzman]

Faster than...say...??

[jlreich]

No. Everything has to up to a particular standard for it to reach a particular speed. It's only as fast as the slowest link. You may have 1000Mbps NIC's on all your machines, but if your router or switch is only 100Mbps that's as fast as you can go. Or of your cable is Cat5 or lower and not Cat5e or better, then your still stuck at a lower speed.

[Variable]

I think he means alternative to ethernet. What makes Ethernet faster than Token Ring is the ability to send and receive faster. It isn't just the NIC, it is also the network hardware and the tweaking of the protocols over the years. The NIC sends packets along and leaves the destination to figure out the order. In token ring, only the machine with the token can tramsit data. ATM is faster but, is not used much for LANS that I know of. ATM has a guaranteed level of service; is connection-oriented, as opposed to connection-less for Ethernet and Tokey Pokey. ATM uses virtual circuits and has QoS negotiated prior to data being sent back and forth. Packets are sent in order and speed is increased because routers don't have to read all the parts of the packet to forward it. It doesn't suffer from distance limitations like ethernet and is bound mostly by the medium the data travels over.

[juniper]

What really makes ATM so fast isn't the protocols being used rather that it uses hardware switching with a FIXED 53 byte packet/cell. It is used in high speed LANs (you can buy ATM switches and NICs on e-bay look up cisco lightstream or CCIE labs) and is mostly on the internet backbone in which ATM can ride on top of SONET/SDH which allows multiplexing using DWDM's that create massive bandwidth circuits using optical fiber with different light colors to seperate the channels. The fastest SONET running in production is OC-768 (40Gbps).