Gigabit over copper? Never say never!

1999-05-12

Broadcom has just announced a new chip which, it is said, enables Ethernet data traffic on copper (and that’s the clever part) at 1000 bits, or one gigabit, per second. A number of people in the industry said it couldn’t be done, but it has. It was only a matter of time, really – just as modem speeds have far exceeded the 300 bit “maximum” originally mooted, so the potential of copper wire has been pushed way beyond initial expectations. This is good news for all those organisations which have flood wired their offices with Cat.5 Universal Twisted Pair – their investment (and their topology) is protected.

The question is – do we still need fibre? Probably not to the desktop, even for high-bandwidth requirements such as streamed video, and maybe not in the machine room either. For example, Fibre Channel Arbitrated Loop boasts transmission speeds of 800K and is being pushed as the plumbing for the storage area network, a topology which separates storage devices onto their own token-based network. Tokens can slow things down, so a number of storage manufacturers are proposing switched FCAL, which enables better use of the bandwidth. But why bother with fibre at all, when the same job can be done over existing copper, only faster?

One thing is for sure. The IT manager’s job can be made easier if designing a network architecture is based around network partitioning for performance, as opposed to partitioning by device type. If all devices share the same network protocol, for example using the Ethernet 10/100/1000 family, then this becomes a real possibility.

(First published 12 May 1999)