This year marks a pivotal transition for network protocol traffic, according to a report from Newton, Massachusetts-based Business Research Group. The conclusions of the report, The Future Of Internetworking, are based on interviews with the 354 people at medium-sized and large companies that agreed to participate. It finds that Internet Package Exchange – IPX – and Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol will continue to reign supreme, but that the momentum of TCP/IP – measured by the percentage of total network traffic it accounts for – will mean it will be more popular than IPX by the end of 1996. According to Business Research, growth in fibre to the desktop is set to be surprisingly strong over the next two years: by the end of 1996, says the company, nearly one in five organisations will choose Ethernet, Token Ring or Fibre Distributed Data Interface running over optical fibre as their principal desktop environment.
Ethernet top choice
Today, distributed Ethernet is the top backbone choice, trailed by distributed Token Ring, collapsed Ethernet and distributed Fibre Distributed Data Interface. While the move to the collapsed network backbone railed by distributed Token Ring, collapsed Ethernet and distributed Fibre Distributed Data Interface. While the move to the collapsed network backbone is undeniable, it is slow in coming, says the report, with six out of 10 respondents to its survey sticking to the distributed backbone. Fast Ethernet will become the most popular fast desktop local area network with Fibre Distributed Data Interface over fibre and Asynchronous Transfer Mode over fibre lagging behind. 100Base-VG proved surprisingly unpopular – although Business Research warns that this rating may be the result of user confusion between 100Base-VG and Fast Ethernet. By the end of 1996, Business Research expects that 16% of medium-sized and large companies will have implemented local area network Asynchronous Transfer Mode operation, and that 17% of wide area networks will be to the Asynchronous Transfer Mode standard. Router-integrated and hub-integrated Asynchronous Mode will be most important here, with stand-alone switched gaining over time. T3 Asynchronous Transfer Mode is the most popular speed, followed by T1 and 155Mbps.
