Steven Schnell sez:
>
FDDI is a finished standard and no more bandwidth upgrades are planned.
Ethernet, however, is now in the gigabit range. It may be extended to
operate in the multi-gigabit range, if the IEEE decides the frame format
and the media access method will work at such speeds. Products based on
GbE are in use today. A NAP can drop in one or two GbE switches, connect
them to existing GIGAswitch/FDDIs, and scale (somewhat) from there. Come
to NANOG this next week to see how this can be done.
See http://cesdis.gsfc.nasa.gov/linux/beowulf/beowulf.html
for an application of Packet Engine GbE.