Modern switches have at least one 100BaseT port, and 100BaseT
hubs are also invariably switches.
Modern "Ethernet cards" are usually auto-detecting "10/100Mbps"
and will run at 100Mbps if possible.
"Full-duplex" systems can simultaneously send and receive at
100Mbps.
Requires Cat5 cable as a minimum, and is commonly used over
dual fibres instead of UTP, giving a distance advantage.
Fibre Distributed Data Interface
FDDI operates at 100 Mbps. It has been the Big New Thing for
more than a decade, but has never been widely adopted due to its
complexity and fiendishly high cost. Dead technology now.
Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM)
This is a system which allows integrated voice/video/data
networks, currently at bit rates between 25Mbps and 625Mbps, with
the most common version running at 155Mbps. Complex and expensive,
but becoming very popular for "campus-wide" networks -- eg, La
Trobe's microwave network is actually an ATM LAN.
Gigabit Ethernet
A variation which is compatible with 10 and 100 Mbps Ethernet,
but runs at 1000Mbps. Still very expensive
(original version only ran over fibre, for example) but will become
the dominant LAN technology this decade.
Note: we have not covered token
ring LANs in this lecture. Maybe see the assignment topics
if interested.
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