Bernhard Kuemel wrote in a message to Gerry Danen:
 GD> Why do you need the fibre?
 GD> 100MB ethernet is quite common now...
 BK> Well, with fibres you can transmit much faster than with
 BK> electric wires.
In theory, yes.  In practice, no.
 BK> I thought maybe with a simple fibre network
 BK> one could exceed the rates of ethernet. But while I think
 BK> about it, some 100 MHz is about the maximum frequency todays
 BK> electric circuits work with. So to get faster the process
 BK> has to be parallelized like using multiple frequencies in
 BK> the fibre which would require something like prisms and
 BK> filters in the fibre connectors and would make the stuff too
 BK> expensive for simple applications. And then, 100 Mbps is
 BK> already as fast as todays hard disks. I only had the feeling
 BK> of my 10 Mbps ethernet. 
Your analysis is pretty accurate.  There are uses for very high speed LAN 
connections, particularly inside routers and switches, and this has led to 
experiments using ATM/SONET/SMDS/choose-your-acronym on backbones.
But no one needs gigabit Ethernet to the desktop.
 
-- Mike
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