Fibre Digital Data Interface, the 100Mbps successor to today’s local area networks, is only just arriving, and already it is being stigmatised as too slow and poorly suited to the emerging needs of network customers – IBM Corp has been saying to anyone who’ll listen that 800Mbps to 1Gbps is nearer the mark, and Microbytes Daily reports that IBM is getting ready to conduct field trials of a(nother) 1Gbps wide-area network called Planet – this time Planet stands for Packetised Lightwave Architecture NETwork, at the Thomas J Watson Research Center in Yorktown, Heights, New York. The 1Gbps Metatring local area network, is scheduled to start tests this summer and the American National Standards Institute has established a sub-committee of X3T9.5 to establish FDDI II to handle higher throughputs. And, says Microbytes, backers of FDDI are already talking about FFOL, the FDDI Follow-On Local network with speeds of at least 600Mbps and possibly 1Gbps. As well as the need for really fast international networks, multimedia is going to require much higher bandwidths.
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