Switched Ethernet helps facilitate this environment, giving users the dedicated bandwidth to handle the traffic that results. Switched Ethernet in turn requires higher-capacity trunks. Another aspect of this change is the emergence of real-time multimedia applications. Video training, for example, is a fairly common application that would bring shared LANs to their knees. Fast Ethernet is being deployed to the desktop as a result.
More applications using more bandwidth means higher-performance desktop connections.
At the same time, desktops themselves are becoming more capable. One final factor involves the changing nature of networking itself. It used to be that LANs were deployed incrementally, departmentally to serve specific groups of users. LAN decisions as a result have become major corporate decisions. LANs are being recentralized.