Depends on what you consider a hassle. Obviously you'll need to invest in new switches, hubs and NICs that can handle gigabit speeds. On the other hand, most modern TCP stacks should be able to handle demands of gigabit networking. On yet another hand, the increased frame rate can seriously overburden an end host so it will be necessary to either use jumbo frames or have a machine fast enough to handle 80,000 interupts a second without seriously degrading the usability of the platform. Gigabit ethernet should serve to enhance QoS applications by providing a high capacity, low latency link.
Work is underway to generally improve ethernet s handling of class of service information.
This material is based in whole or in part on work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant Nos.