Need for Speed

The past few years have seen some tremendous advances not only in networking technologies
but also in the demands placed on them. In the past 20 years, we have seen the emergence of
standards for 10Mb Ethernet, 16Mb Token Ring, 100Mb FDDI, 100Mb Ethernet, 155Mb
ATM (Asynchronous Transfer Mode), 655Mb ATM, 1Gb Ethernet, 2.5Gb ATM., and 10Gb
Ethernet (over optical fiber only as of this writing). Network technology designers are already
planning technologies to support data rates of up to 100Gbps.
The average number of nodes on a network segment has decreased dramatically, while the
number of applications and the size of the data transferred has increased dramatically. Applications
are becoming more complex, and the amount of network bandwidth required by the typical
user is increasing. Is the bandwidth provided by some of the new ultra-high-speed network applications
(such as 1Gb Ethernet) required today? Maybe not to the desktop, but network backbones
already take advantage of them.
Does the fact that software applications and data are putting more and more of a demand on
the network have anything to do with data cabling? You might think that the issue is more
related to network-interface cards, hubs, switches, and routers but, as data rates increase, the
need for higher levels of performance on the cable also increases.