AirLive Ether-GSH16TW - Manual (Page 7)

7
Introduction
This chapter describes the features of the 16-Port
10/100/1000Mbps Gigabit Ethernet Web Smart Switch and
some background information about Ethernet/Fast
Ethernet/Gigabit Ethernet switching technology.
Gigabit Ethernet Technology
Gigabit Ethernet is an extension of IEEE 802.3 Ethernet utilizing
the same packet structure, format, and support for CSMA/CD
protocol, full duplex, flow control, and management objects, but
with a tenfold increase in theoretical throughput over 100-Mbps
Fast Ethernet and a hundredfold increase over 10-Mbps
Ethernet. Since it is compatible with all 10-Mbps and 100-Mbps
Ethernet environments, Gigabit Ethernet provides a
straightforward upgrade without wasting a company’s existing
investment in hardware, software, and trained personnel.
The increased speed and extra bandwidth offered by Gigabit
Ethernet is essential to coping with the network bottlenecks that
frequently develop as computers and their busses get faster and
more users use applications that generate more traffic.
Upgrading key components, such as your backbone and servers
to Gigabit Ethernet can greatly improve network response times
as well as significantly speed up the traffic between your
subnets.
Gigabit Ethernet enables fast optical fiber connections to
support video conferencing, complex imaging, and similar
data-intensive applications. Likewise, since data transfers occur
10 times faster than Fast Ethernet, servers outfitted with Gigabit
Ethernet NIC’s are able to perform 10 times the number of
operations in the same amount of time.
In addition, the phenomenal bandwidth delivered by Gigabit