Distinguished Lecturer Series
Lab for Computer Science, MIT
Thursday, May 8, 1997
Lecture, 3:30pm
Refreshments, 3:15pm
Room 34-101
50 Vassar Street
Cambridge, MA USA
Gigabit Ethernet, ATM and the Death of Phone Companies
Professor David Cheriton
Department of Computer Science
Stanford University
The development of Gigabit Ethernet could be viewed as the arrival of
yet another networking technology, adding to the existing pool of
approaches to "moving the bits''. However, every once in a while,
something somewhat ordinary happens which is extraordinarily
important, a turning point in history. Gigabit Ethernet is such a
turning point. In this talk, I elaborate on this theme. Gigabit
Ethernet delivers the fatal blow to ATM as a determining networking
technology. In doing so, it defeats a whole strategy being used to
preserve a communication monopoly and a "pre-computing'' view of
communication. Moreover, it represents the real beginning of making
bandwidth a commodity and decentralizing the control of communication,
making there be effectively no control. In this step, it also
represents the transition for the technology from one whose limits are
resources to the one where the limit is, as seems inevitable with all
technologies, trust.
Host: Michael Dertouzos