Networking The Complete Reference, Third Edition

CHAPTER

10 Ethernet Basics

Ethernet is the data link layer protocol used by the vast majority of the local area networks operating today. Since the 1990s, the Ethernet standards have been revised and updated to support many different types of network media and to provide dramatic speed increases over the original protocol. Because all of the Ethernet variants operate using the same basic principles and because the high-speed Ethernet technologies were designed with backward compatibility in mind, upgrading a standard network is usually relatively easy. This is in marked contrast to other high-speed technologies such as Fiber Distributed Data Interface (FDDI) and Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM), for which upgrades can require extensive infrastructure ...