Best Article About Gigabit Ethernet

The IEEE 802.3 committee designed the gigabit Ethernet which has a data rate of 1000Mbps or 1Gbps. The MAC layer and the access methods remain the same as that of the Ethernet with the data rate of 10Mbps to 100Mbps. But the only difference is that the collision domain is very much reduced. There are also little changes seen in the physical layer i.e. the transmission media and the encoding system. The gigabit Ethernet is mainly designed to use the optical fiber although the protocol does not eliminate the use of twisted pair cables. It uses four important implementations namely; 1000Base-LX, 1000Base-SX, 1000Base-CX and 1000Base-T.The 1000Base-SX uses a multimode fiber and transmits short-wave laser signals covering a distance of 550m. The1000Base-LX uses multi or single mode fiber and uses long wave laser signals covering 550 to 5000m. The 1000Base-CX and 1000Base-T uses STP and UTP mediums respectively. They transmit data as electrical signals covering 25m.The encoding is 8B/10B which means a group of 8 bits are encoded into a group of 10 binary bits. The gigabit Ethernet acts as a backbone to connect fast Ethernet networks which operates at 100Mbps. As a result we find gigabit Ethernet to increase the speed and performance of Ethernet LANs.