Anyone who does much driving in the UK cannot have failed to notice that the road networks are in quite a mess . Traffic jams are a serious blight on business and productivity in the UK , and huge amounts of work is if we are to improve things and it is also necessary to re-think how we get around or indeed if we need to travel in the first place . In my local area of East Sussex , a whole raft of new road improvements have just been proposed , but I can ’ t help thinking it just looks like a sticking plaster to cover a serious wound .
Things also looked pretty clocked on the other highway , the networked one , it too is under-strain , but the solutions being suggested here going to be more effective that my local trunk road extension ?
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Daniel J Sait , editor in chief , ATM |
As I started writing this column , new research from R & M highlighted the bottlenecks that will be seen in many local data networks in the future .
Local area networks in many existing office buildings are reaching their limits in terms of performance , which should come as a shock , but , to be honest I am not that surprised .
R & M estimates that around 80 % of the office buildings and functional buildings in western industrialised countries were put up before 1990 . As the company points out , the structured cabling in these buildings also usually dates from when the buildings were built . At that time , the LAN was designed for a maximum transmission performance of one Gigabit Ethernet ! If office networks are to remain usable for the next 20 years , they will require a performance of ten times this at 10 Gigabit Ethernet .
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Crucially , the cabling of offices and buildings cannot be expanded at the same breath taking speed at which IP traffic is growing . Back to my driving analogy – no experts suggested when the M25 was completed in 1986 that average daily traffic would see more than 263,000 vehicles use the motorway every day .
Like our roads should be , local data networks need to be planned on a long-term basis and with the greatest possible system reserves .
A LAN with a transmission performance of 10 Gigabit Ethernet may seem a little excessive today . However , the full performance may soon already be needed .
A final note this month , I am delighted to say that I have taken over editing NCN from this issue . As the senior editorial person at ATM , owners of NCN , an influx of new staff has freed-up more of my time and I will devoting much of that to developing NCN , so see you all very soon .
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NEXT TIME … |