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From: | Steve Schear |
Subject: | [Discuss-gnuradio] Gigabit coming to the desktop |
Date: | Thu, 07 Nov 2002 12:46:28 -0800 |
Gigabit to desktop? Not so fast
By Phil Hochmuth
Network World, 11/04/02
<http://www.nwfusion.com/news/2002/1104hp.html>
Vendors might be moving full-bore to drive Gigabit Ethernet to the desktop, but users have other plans - at least for now.
Hewlett-Packard this week will debut two fixed-port Gigabit Ethernet switches aimed at desktop users. Foundry Networks also this week will unveil a Gigabit workgroup box. Cisco recently announced new copper-based Gigabit switch products, and Dell has promised to ship its business PCs with integrated 10/100/1000Base-T ports.
The decision to upgrade to Gigabit seems simple, right?
Not so, according to industry observers, who say there are few applications to utilize the high-speed network gear, and technical hurdles such as PC throughput preclude widespread implementation. "The biggest obstacle I see to Gigabit on the desktop is that there's no killer app for it," says Lawrence Orans, a senior analyst with Gartner. "There's no need for a mainstream end user of a business PC to have Gigabit Ethernet on his desktop. For the daily computing tasks most enterprise end users take on - e-mail, Web browsing and some client/server applications - 10/100M bit/sec Ethernet is just fine."
While applications such as voice and video have been touted as killer applications for desktop Gigabit, this is a misconception, Orans says. An uncompressed voice call over IP takes up only 64K bit/sec of bandwidth. A quality video stream is not much higher, averaging from 200K to 400K bit/sec. "That's a drop in the bucket when you're talking about a 100-megabit connection," he says.
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