Is future-proofing a thing of the past?

Doesn’t anyone believe in future-proofing anymore? Last week, a Gartner analyst said most people don’t need Gigabit Ethernet everywhere and should spend their money on other things.

First off, it’s interesting that we’re having this discussion today. For years we’ve been saying how Gigabit to the desktop is overkill, and longtime readers can back me up on that.

But I’ve also come to grips with the fact that Gigabit is the new de facto standard, simply because it’s not that much more expensive than Fast Ethernet at this point, and it’s getting rolled into products from all vendors.

And, as my colleague Phil Hochmuth argues in his blog this week, while you probably don’t need Gigabit Ethernet all the time, it does allow you certain large file transfers and bursts.

So why fight it?

A Gartner analyst says there is still a premium for Gigabit Ethernet, and when you add it all up, companies will spend $10 billion on Gigabit LAN equipment in the next two years, money that would be better spent on higher-level technologies like security and application optimization.

He points out that today’s applications don’t really tax Gigabit Ethernet, but conventional wisdom says that you plan ahead a little bit, and try to account for the applications you don’t yet know you’ll need. In other words, you future-proof. Is that an outmoded concept? Have we hit a wall on the bandwidth we’ll need in the LAN?

Also, does that mean we should change the name of this newsletter from “High-Speed LANs” to something less focused on speed?

I welcome your comments. mailto:jcaruso@nww.com