Posts Tagged ‘T1’

Is Ethernet The Right Solution For Your Data Network?

Saturday, May 31st, 2008

This is not a trivial question. Ethernet is relatively ubiquitous, in that most computers and peripherals speak ethernet. Ethernet is routable - far too many protocols aren’t - and is relatively fast (10 gigabits per second for a high-end card, but you can bundle up to 10 of them to create a pseudo-100 gigabit connection) and is relatively cheap.

Ok, those are the benefits. Are there drawbacks? Yes. Ethernet isn’t good on latency, there’s no meaningful error correction, there are many defined types of ethernet frame (which means you can assume companies have taken shortcuts in testing), offloading of security and checksumming is rare to non-existent, very high-speed cables are amazingly fragile, hardware multicast support is generally minimal (a bother for LANs where many protocols are multicast these days) and vendors often cut corners on using components of adequate quality.