Talk:Ethernet

According to Peterson & Davie's Computer Networks (ed. 3, p 116), Ethernet is a 1-persistent protocol. This means when a busy line goes idle, an Ethernet adaptor will promptly send any queued frames (specifically, after a 9.6 microsecond delay); the article contradicts this with the statement "Wire just became idle - Wait a random time." I believe that statement only applies after a collision, although the article implies it is relevant even without a collision. But actually, I thought the exponential backoff started right after step 2, not after the busy line goes idle. The CSMA/CD article says the backoff starts after the jamming signal. -- anon

I have seen 100base5 (100mbit thicknet) beeing refered to in the manual of my IBM rs/6000 unix machine, and when searching around the web it seems to really exist. Does anyone know more which they can add in the article?

Gah, what a mess. Should it be 100baseTX or 100BaseTX? We have both. -- ansible

I think it should be 100BaseTx. Wesley

No, we already have 10base2, 10base5 and 10baseT

None of the above. These designations are so often misquoted, but they are correctly 10BASE2, 10BASE5 and 10BASE-T

Similarly 100BASE-TX, 1000BASE-SX, etc.

I would correct the article now, but I'm not feeling up to learning how to rename all the relevent articles and create redirects. I would confirm, however, that I have as I type this a copy on my lap of the official IEEE Ethernet standard (2000 edition) -- all 1515 pages of it -- and I have verified the above designations against it. The general rule would appear to be that the designations are entirely uppercase, with no punctucation, except that if BASE is followed by an alphabetic (rather than numeric) designation, it is separated by a hyphen. I believe there are other minor errors in the article, I will come back to this when I have time. -roy

Ok I think I've done this right, I've fixed up the ones I've found, though there may well be others. As to whether we really need a separate entry for every flavour of ethernet, I'll leave that up to someone else... -roy

Also note that there is no hyphen between 10G and BASE in the 10Gbps standards, eg 10GBASE-SR -roy

The frame format stuff needs checking, as it is severely confusing even with references open in front of me!

There is so much more to write about here: AUIs, heartbeats, spanning tree, VLANs, G Ethernet and its relationship to Fiber Channel, 10G Ethernet and its relationship to SONET...

I now added a "See also" section and listed some of the terms. Gigabit Ethernet and 10 Gigabit Ethernet have their own pages, so Fiber Channel and SONE should be mentioned there (SONET already is, very shortly). Colin Marquardt

I added the Netware References and Link to the frame type section. the whole text is a bit confusing - suggestions for improvement ? Wefa 22:45, 9 Jul 2004 (UTC)

This isn't a full-blown networking textbook, I suppose, but I'd like to see more mention of duplex. It is supposed to be automatic but causes us nothing but trouble. Sorry, I don't feel qualified to contribute that part. --Kbh3rd 02:55, 30 Sep 2004 (UTC)

I removed the link to "Wireless Ethernet"(aka 802.11 aka WiFi) in the "Related Standards" section. It stated that 802.11 uses the Ethernet headers(which is false) and that 802.11 is interoperable with Ethernet(which is ridiculous -- how can a standard for wired communication with interoperable with a standard for wireless communication?)--Ryan Stone 18:13, 25 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Wrong, to the OS, 802.11 is ethernet with ethernet frames, turn on network bridge in WinXP to see, or you can explain how on earth this [1] and this [2] possible?

There are a lot of networking technologies (like Ethernet, 802.11, Token ring, etc.), and a plethora of devices for converting from one to another, allowing them to interoperate. But without some kind of bridge to convert the media and frame types, devices using these different technologies can't communicate. And the bridging can get tricky; consider that 802.11 allows longer frames than Ethernet does, and that 802.11 must use IEEE 802.2. --Rick Sidwell 22:25, 12 Feb 2005 (UTC)

802.11 is not ethernet with ethernet frames to the OS. This is a feature of the NIC driver, or as with Windows and its miniport drivers, it's a function of the 802.11 MAC-layer driver in NDIS. The NDIS spec states that the the MAC-layer driver should present NDIS with 802.3 frames, thus it performs a conversion. If one has a driver with so-called monitor mode support, this functionality can be turned off. EOD :-) --Gosub 13:08, 24 Jun 2005 (UTC)

I'm unaware of any etiquette/procedure for doing this, but is there any way that your description of Ethernet's tranceiver protocol could be duplicated on the page describing CSMA/CD? --Kierah 14:03, 16 Mar 2005 (UTC)

As I mentioned in Template_Talk:IPstack#Template_overuse I don't think it is appropriate to put the IPstack template on the Ethernet page. Does anyone disagree? Sfisher 00:45, September 8, 2005 (UTC)

I agree that Ethernet is not part of the "Internet protocol suite", exactly. However, Ethernet is very often used as a link for IP networks; and the terms "Internet" and "Ethernet" get chucked around a lot, and sound superficially similar. So I can imagine someone coming here to figure out how they relate to each other. Hence, illustrating (as the IPstack template does) that Ethernet is one of several protocols that can be used to carry IP seems useful to me. Failing that, maybe a section called "Ethernet's relationship to Internet" or something. -- Johantheghost 21:00, 16 September 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Bit of a "Credit where credit's due" rant... :-) The article says:

Ethernet was originally developed as one of the many pioneering projects at Xerox PARC...

Ethernet is based on the idea of peers on the network sending messages in what was essentially a radio system, captive inside a common wire or channel, sometimes referred to as the ether.

Wouldn't this be a good place to mention the University of Hawaii, who paved the way with radio-based CSMA/CD on their AlohaNet? Wasn't the name Ethernet based at least in part on this pure radio origin? (I believe that the first incarnation of Ethernet at PARC was called Alto Aloha Network, as it was an Aloha-based scheme for networking Xerox Alto computers.)

BTW, no argument about the great work that PARC has done over the years! - Johantheghost 21:46, 16 September 2005 (UTC)[reply]

According to most online dictionaries that I have reviewed, the standard pronunciation is with accent on the initial long "E". There does appear to be a conventionally used alternate pronunciation with the accent on the "eth" with a short "e". However this only applies to the generic use of the word, since the trademarked name uses the former pronunciation.

Since this is a somewhat disputed point, the least-contoversial approach is just to leave this out, since pronunciation is not typically included in Wikipedia articles (this is better handled in Wiktionary). If the point of dispute is important enough to include, it should at least address the commonality of both forms of pronunciation, support any assertions, and use IPA pronunctiaton markup as described in article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style_%28pronunciation%29

-- Plugwash 19:14, 16 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

There can be some history info about them, list of products (?), wiring (as for 100BASE-TX), information about signals encoding. 194.85.82.121 01:04, 17 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]