It's method is known as Demand Priority. Network purists claim that VG is not Ethernet at all (Henderson, 1995), because it avoids the traditional Ethernet transmission method. 100VG-AnyLAN will also support both Ethernet and Token-Ring transmissions.
Other differences between the two Ethernet technologies are minimal, and the choice will not be an easy one for businesses. Larger businesses processing very large amounts of data will be served better by VG's demand priority technology, whereas many businesses may prefer to stick with the tried and true CSMA/CD.
Regardless of which technology is chosen, industry experts are saying that Fast-Ethernet will be eclipsed by FDDI in the short-term, due to the maturity of the product, and the services it provides. In the long term, they expect ATM to become the network technology of choice, once it overcomes its problems with standards and infrastructure.
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2. Introduction.
High-speed networking has taken on a number of different forms over the past few years. Although this report will focus on one of these technologies, namely Fast-Ethernet, it is important to discuss the other main technologies emerging in this area. Two such network technologies are Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM), and Fibre Distributed Data Interface (FDDI). This report will look briefly at these forms of high-speed networking, and discuss in more detail the emerging technologies in the Fast-Ethernet market.
High-speed networking has certainly gained the interest of most businesses and computing vendors. It is estimated that the world-wide high-speed network market will grow to around US$1.7 billion in 1998, with the long-term market being dominated by ATM (Yakal, 1995).
As companies try to squeeze as much data down a cable as possible, they have become frustrated with the existing, limited bandwidth technologies, such as standard Ethernet and Token ring.
