Ethernet turns 30 gracefully

Everyone probably wishes they looked as good at 30 as Ethernet.

Since its invention in 1973, the fabled network technology has evolved from a shared to a dedicated medium and undergone a nearly 1,000-fold speed increase. And along the way it quashed all LAN comers - namely Token Ring, FDDI and ATM.

But if one thing has remained constant with Ethernet, it's change, including expansion into the wide area and, well, into the ether.

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Everyone probably wishes they looked as good at 30 as Ethernet.

Since its invention in 1973, the fabled network technology has evolved from a shared to a dedicated medium and undergone a nearly 1,000-fold speed increase. And along the way it quashed all LAN comers - namely Token Ring, FDDI and ATM.

But if one thing has remained constant with Ethernet, it's change, including expansion into the wide area and, well, into the ether.

Bob Metcalfe invented Ethernet 30 years ago last month at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). One of the celebrants at Ethernet's birthday party at Xerox PARC on May 22 was Bob Grow, an Intel engineer and chair of the IEEE 802.3 Working Group , which governs the Ethernet standard.

"Ethernet has been successful in every area it's been extended to," Grow says. "It's now part of the entrenched infrastructure. And one thing that's always been true in the communications market is that it's hard to displace something that's entrenched."

Ethernet simply seems to get more entrenched each year. Technological improvements have let Ethernet creep into metropolitan-area networks (MAN) as an alternative to SONET transport, and even as an alternative to DSL and frame relay in the last mile. But perhaps most significantly, the emergence of Wi-Fi wireless extensions to Ethernet seem to guarantee the technology yet another growth opportunity.

While 802.11 is commonly called Wireless Ethernet, Grow says this is a slight misnomer. "Is 802.11 really Ethernet? No. But the first thing that happens when you come out of an access point is connect to an Ethernet LAN."

While 10/100M bit/sec Ethernet accounts for more than 90% of the world's LAN ports, some say Wi-Fi's mobility and ease of use could reduce the number of Ethernet endpoints. "As an access technology . . . Wi-Fi is becoming the biggest challenger to 802.3 Ethernet in a long time," says Abner Germanow, an analyst with IDC.

But the fact that Wi-Fi is a shared media where clients compete for bandwidth, and there are concerns about security. might hinder Wi-Fi's acceptance. "A lot of the questions around Wi-Fi are starting to have better answers," says Aaron Vance, an analyst with Synergy Research Group. He cites the emergence of wireless LAN switch products - equipment that bridges wireless Wi-Fi environments to the wired Ethernet world - as an example of improvements. Standards such as 802.11a and 802.11i also will make Wi-Fi faster and more secure. As a result, Synergy predicts that one in 10 LAN clients could be wireless by 2007.