3Com Corp, San Jose, has developed a means of transmitting real-time, interactive and multimedia traffic over an Ethernet. Called PACE, Priority Access Control Enabled, it prioritises vital traffic to solve the Ethernet indeterminacy problem, where you never know which message will get through first, or how many times a particular user will suffer a collision before transmission can begin. It has the support of seven companies, Apple Computer Inc, Dell Computer Corp, Novell Inc, Oracle Corp, Silicon Graphics Inc, Starlight Networks Inc and Sun Microsystems Inc. It uses a new switching technology that exploits the trend towards switched media and away from shared media in Ethernets.The switch monitors traffic and guarantees network access to high-priority traffic to increase the efficiency of bandwidth use and enable traffic of different priority levels to share the same local network segment, accommodating ordinary data and time-sensitive data over the same physical network infrastructure. 3Com claims that the new technique technology complements new high-speed technologies such as Asynchronous Transfer Mode FDDI and Fast Ethernet.
