Gigabit to desktop? Not so fast

Vendors might be moving full-bore to drive Gigabit Ethernet to the desktop, but users have other plans - at least for now.

Hewlett-Packard this week will debut two fixed-port Gigabit Ethernet switches aimed at desktop users. Foundry Networks also this week will unveil a Gigabit workgroup box. Cisco recently announced new copper-based Gigabit switch products, and Dell has promised to ship its business PCs with integrated 10/100/1000Base-T ports.

The decision to upgrade to Gigabit seems simple, right?

Not so, according to industry observers, who say there are few applications to utilize the high-speed network gear, and technical hurdles such as PC throughput preclude widespread implementation. "The biggest obstacle I see to Gigabit on the desktop is that there's no killer app for it," says Lawrence Orans, a senior analyst with Gartner. "There's no need for a mainstream end user of a business PC to have Gigabit Ethernet on his desktop. For the daily computing tasks most enterprise end users take on - e-mail, Web browsing and some client/server applications - 10/100M bit/sec Ethernet is just fine."

While applications such as voice and video have been touted as killer applications for desktop Gigabit, this is a misconception, Orans says. An uncompressed voice call over IP takes up only 64K bit/sec of bandwidth. A quality video stream is not much higher, averaging from 200K to 400K bit/sec. "That's a drop in the bucket when you're talking about a 100-megabit connection," he says.

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"If all you're doing is checking e-mail, surfing the Web and using word processing programs, there's no need for Gigabit Ethernet on the desktop" says John Savage, chief systems engineer at Christopher Newport University in Newport News, Va. "[Gigabit Ethernet] is useful when we have to move large amounts of data on and off a server."

Savage has deployed around two dozen workstations with copper-based Gigabit Ethernet connections using 3Com PC adapter cards and switches. The Gigabit desktops are used mostly by his IT staff for tasks such as database file maintenance and application development. But he does not foresee a widespread deployment of Gigabit copper ports in the near future to areas such as faculty and staff offices, or student computer labs.

Despite lukewarm demand from users and skepticism from analysts, vendors seem undeterred. In HP's case, the company will announce the ProCurve 2724, a 24-port 10/100/1000M bit/sec switch with four mini-Gigabit interface card (GBIC) slots for fiber-optic uplinks. HP also is releasing its eight-port ProCurve 2708 with eight copper Gigabit ports for smaller workgroups.

"We are starting to see Gigabit Ethernet become more affordable, and with that it will become easier to distribute corporate applications," says Darla Sommerville, general manager for HP's ProCurve Networking business. "The idea is to get as much power to the edge of the network as possible."

Foundry will release a new Gigabit Ethernet workgroup box this week with its EdgeIron 24G, which has 24 10/100/1000M copper ports and four mini-GBIC uplinks.