15.8. Where is the network going?

When you look closely at the technologies described above, you’ll see one thing in common: the simple, inexpensive ones are succeeding, whereas the complex and expensive ones are dying quickly. Where does this put us down the road?

Ethernet has pummeled its rivals because it is incredibly inexpensive. It’s so simple to implement that today you can even buy microwave ovens with Ethernet interfaces. Ethernet has scaled well: in many organizations, 10 Mb/s Ethernet infrastructure from the early 1980s is still in production use, connected into 100 Mb/s and 1 Gb/s segments. 10 Gb/s Ethernet is already in development and should be widely available by 2004. We expect to see this trend continue, with faster and faster switching hardware to connect it all.