GigE's use in both LAN and WAN gives greater scale yet. So it looks like the Stupid Network will be built of GigE over glass. In the Interview Dov takes us through the technology reasons for Ethernet's increase in speed as its importance in LANs has grown and LANs themselves get larger and more bandwidth hungry. Ethernet, in short, is leveraging its ubiquity, low cost and open standards on the back of the growing importance of the Internet and its increased bandwidth. In doing so it is playing a significant role in making new industries like Application Service provision possible.
Ethernet is a very simple, yet elegant protocol.
But because of its simplicity, it's extremely inexpensive to develop and to manufacture Ethernet-compliant devices. Many people are taking gigabit Ethernet and applying it to wide area networking because of its simplicity, ease of access and simplicity of its framing. In its relationship between volume and pricing Gigabit Ethernet offers significant values. Gigabit Ethernet initially was being installed in the local area network to provide interconnection between boxes that were connecting 100 megabits, and 10megabits, to the desktop. The volume of that kind of traffic quickly becomes very large.