The Gigabit Ethernet Alliance – formed in May to promote development of a 1,000Mbps Ethernet standard (CI No 2,915) – has attracted a further 28 companies to its membership list, bringing the total to more than 50 companies. New members include Adaptec Inc, Advanced Micro Devices Inc, Apple Computer Inco, Asante Technologies Inc, Cabletron Systems Inc, Digital Equipment Corp, Lucent Technologies Inc, Madge Networks Inc, MMC Networks Inc, National Semiconductor Corp, Network Peripherals Inc, PlainTree Systems Inc, PMC-Sierra Inc, Texas Instruments Inc and Xylan Corp. A couple of surprise names were also on the list, the first being Ipsilon Networks Inc, the company that pioneered the concept of the Internet Protocol switch (CI No 2,923). Larry Blair, Ipsilon’s vice-president of marketing, says that while Ipsilon has not ruled out the possibility of eventually developing native Gigabit Ethernet switches, its main interest is in applying its Layer 2 Internet Protocol switching approach to Gigabit Ethernet hardware, just as it has done with Asynchronous Transfer Mode hardware. For this reason, Frame Relay-based Internet Protocol switches are also being considered since switching down to Layer 2 is independent of the actual switching system. The second surprise is Hewlett-Packard Co, which for a long time eschewed Fast Ethernet in favor of its 100VG-AnyLAN technology before making an about-face at the end of last year. John Selep, the company’s PC Connect product line manager says, however, that the issues which caused Hewlett to avoid Fast Ethernet are not applicable to Gigabit Ethernet. Hewlett originally objected to Fast Ethernet’s use of the Carrier Sense Multiple Access with Collision Detection protocol, and although the Gigabit Alliance says it is also committed to CSMA/CD, Selep believes this is more rhetoric than anything else. He feels the commitment to CSMA/CD is designed to reassure users that Gigabit Ethernet will be a true descendant of Ethernet, and that since Gigabit Ethernet will not find a home in the shared environments where CSMA/CD is used – Hewlett predicts only point-to-point switch-to-server and switch-to-switch deployments – the issue of its use is something of an irrelevance. Selep says Hewlett is also involved with work going on within the IEEE’s 802.12 committee to see if a Gigabit version of 100VG-AnyLAN is feasible.
