Twenty years ago Ethernet moved bits around LANs at a rate of 10 million per second, a speed few libraries thought they needed. Now that the majority of LANs being installed in libraries are 10/100 Mbps, some libraries are beginning to look at 1.0 Gbps, but the standards setters are still one more step ahead, 10 Gbps.
A draft of the new standard will be circulated over the next few months. The final standard is planned for the first quarter of 2002. One of the greatest benefits of the new standard will be low-cost teleconferencing within an organization or over longer distances if a broadband MAN (Metropolitan Area Network) is available. Another application is multimedia over the Internet, again subject to availability of a low-cost broadband channel between an organization and the Internet.
