Ethernet 101: Introduction to Ethernet Webinar Coming
I’m dedicating the upcoming webinar to the newbies out there who want to learn about Ethernet in an hour. I’ll be presenting this webinar with Hugh Barrass on June 27th at 9am Pacific. Hugh and I both develop IEEE 802 standards and will give a high level overview of Ethernet.
We’ll start the webinar by briefly talking about the early days of Ethernet when companies wanted to connect a few workstations to a printer at 10Mb/s. These early network shared one coaxial cable and met the needs of these early users before the Internet even existed. Ethernet evolved into switched networks where the power of the network grew with the interconnection of many more devices, new applications and eventually the Internet.
Now Ethernet is the most widely deployed network and speeds along from 100 Mb/s to 100Gb/s and we’re working on 400GbE now in the IEEE standards. Ethernet has grown in many ways more than just speed. From increasing reliability to enabling quality of service (QoS), Ethernet has enabled many new applications and deployments continue in brave new areas.
A couple of the new application spaces for Ethernet that will be discussed are automotive and cable television networks. The main standard for automotive applications that is being developed now is called Reduced Twisted Pair Gigabit Ethernet PHY to send Gigabit Ethernet over a single pair of wires in a car or bus to replace the various wire harnesses in a car. The EPON Protocol over Coax (EPOC) takes Ethernet back to its roots by using cable television’s coaxial cables to transmit Ethenet to the home. These two applications could result in hundreds of millions of new Ethernet ports by the end of the decade.
I want to stress that we’ve made this Ethernet 101 webinar very high level so that we can reach a wider audience. The webinar is intended for viewers interested in information technology who aren’t familiar with various aspects of Ethernet. The webinar shows how most personal computers and servers are connected to the LAN and how the LAN connects to the Internet via a router. The Introduction to Ethernet webinar will not dive into technical details and will tell the story of Ethernet.
The Ethernet Alliance aspires to be the voice of Ethernet by educating the community on what Ethernet does and what it will be able to do in the near future. The Ethernet community recently celebrated its 40th birthday and this webinar will help explain what Ethernet can do for you today and over the next 40 years.
We hope that you can attend the webinar in person on June 27th, but if you can’t, the webinar will be available on the Ethernet Alliance website with the other webinars in the series.
By Scott Kipp
President of the Ethernet Alliance
The views and opinions expressed in this blog are solely that of the individual(s) and should not be considered the views or positions of the Ethernet Alliance.
