Gigabit ethernet cards are now down to around $ 50.00 each or so in some cases. Is there any conceivable utility for a gigabit ethernet network in the home or is this stuff strictly for high end, high speed network backbone type stuff? What does anyone do in a home or office that’s going to make a 100 Mps connection seem inadequate?
Just curious about the market utility of gigabit ethernet beyond backroom stuff.
Transferring files over a network can quickly make 100mbit ethernet seem snail-like. Gigabit Ethernet would be a nice replacement, but you won’t come CLOSE to saturating it given today’s technology. This is because even the fastest IDE HDDs top out at a transfer rate of 50MB/sec, which is 400mbit. With full duplex gigabit ethernet giving you 2000mbit/sec, we’ve got a way to go. Though, files would still move at least twice as fast as standard 100mbit ethernet. Note also that while gigabit NICs may be getting affordable, gigabit ethernet switches and the like are still astronomically expensive.
Ethernet is really good…but the market cost? wow! (I think you should buy it and invest in blue chips…very handy!!! :D)
I think it’s all about time efficiency. I’m not too sure if Faux has a clue what hes talking about too 
The “killer app” of Gigabit is video. That takes a lot of bandwidth. Also, keep in mind, that in business with thousands of PCs, with dozens per ethernet segment, that bandwidth quickly gets chopped up among a lot of users. Economically, it also makes a lot of sense to run 1 Gigabit cable rather than a bunch of lower capacity cable that will soon be outdated. Running cable is a big expense. And then there’s reducing latency for things like Voice over IP, etc.
Only if your hard drive is capable of sustaining 12 MEGABYTES per second. Run a benchmark.
In the home I have no idea. Video sounds like a good suggestion.
If you ever deal with large office networks, you’d have a very good idea what the need is. It is not simply a matter of speed. Its also a matter of how wide the pipe is.
As an over-simpliefied analogy, visualize data traffic on a network as water. The bandwidth of the network is the pipe. A higher speed network has wider pipes. The data can go through faster, and more of it can go through at any given time.
On a larger network, you need to consider not simply that computer A wants file B from Server C. Yeah, there may be other bottlenecks that will not allow that specific transfer to happen at optimum network speed. However, in a large network, there are hundreds if not thousands of clients making similar requests. The wider the pipe, the faster all the requests can be serviced.
What you will see a lot in current network design are high speed server backbones. The servers are put on seperate highspeed routers/switches. The client side of things still uses good old 10/100, because as you note, the clients only need so much speed. But these requests are then aggregated into larger groups and fed to the servers that way.
Another reason servers are put on a seperate backbone is that many of today’s applications require reliable high speed communication between multiple servers. The backbone segregates off client traffic to insure the servers can talk to each other. The high speed on the backbone will also allow for high speed data transfer to things like central backup systems, SAN devices etc.
Jonathan Woodall: If your HDD isn’t capable of reading at 12.5MB/sec, its either VERY old, VERY fragmented, or both.
I can see the need. Our house has a small 100mps home network of four PC’s. We don’t have cable TV, but we keep all of our downloaded movies and TV shows in shared directories. Depending on the quality of video, if two or three programs are being served up simultaneously, things can bog down. It’s not unusual for me to be watching something that’s local to my one of my housemate’s PC’s while someone else is watching something that’s sitting on my machine. Same goes for streaming mp3’s. And of course, at any given point in time, someone is going out to the internet. We have a very busy domestic network, and an upgrade would be quite noticible. If three people are playing a networked game, and someone else decides to watch The Sopranos, they’re going to suffer for their sins.
I’ll add to Larry Mudd’s comment –
When connected via ethernet between immediate peers via a hub (not switches), the ethernet speed is the theoretical limit of all traffic. So 10 computers all wanting to transfer files at the same time can easily bog down even gigabit networks.