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In praise of Ethernet: a technology that 'just works'

by Manek Dubash | posted on 03 May 2007

For a technology that's over 30 years old, Ethernet's doing pretty well. And this week, it's just taken another step forward.

Invented as a way of shifting bits around the office, the technology that's become almost invisible -- literally so in the case of Wi-Fi, which is a form of Ethernet -- networking has come a long way.

And the man who invented the technology, Bob Metcalfe, is still around and still involved in the industry.

It all started with thick yellow cables, not very flexible, which snaked their way between various computers at Xerox PARC -- the company's technology development hothouse -- to the printer, the classic shared resource.

Printers were expensive, so it made sense to have technology that allowed several users to share one device. That's how it all started. Since then the technology has evolved, rather slowly at first, and progress seemed to take a long breather when it got to 10Mbits/second.

In the late 1980s, thinner co-axial cables made Ethernet more flexible but had the fatal flaw that if one of the cables was unplugged, the whole network fell over. Such as was the flakey state of software on the PC in those days that connected PCs were highly likely to give up at that point too. Oh, how Mac users laughed.

But it got better, and, with the introduction by Synoptics of a hub-based topology that allowed users to unplug cables at will and which enabled faster speeds, Ethernet's time had come.

It moved into the RF space with early versions of what we now call Wi-Fi, and the wired version got a speed bump to 100Mbits/second. And now there are several versions of the standard, united in their use of a common Ethernet data frame.

As a result, the number of applications for Ethernet continues to proliferate, as evinced by one vendor, BlueArc's announcement this week of 10Gbit/second Ethernet-attached storage.

As well as competing with fibre, with circuit-switched technologies in carrier networks and with long-range wireless, Ethernet is now taking on Fibre Channel, the storage industry's connectivity technology. The signs are that Ethernet will continue to proliferate in multiple ways using its unique strength.

It's not always the most robust nor the fastest, nor always the best engineered technology for a given application. But it has proven itself over time to be the cheapest and, in general, the best 'good enough' technology.

It just works. It's a pity you can't say that about so many other technologies we use.