4 ms·

wait, since when can gigabit ethernet transmit more than a gigabit per second?

• jwbensley 9y ago
  Are you referring to this? "GbE is 1250Mbps" 1.25Gbps is the "gross" bit rate for 1000BASE-T Ethernet. This is because it uses 8b/10b encoding on the wire (meaning there is a 25% overhead): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/8b/10b_encoding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/8b/10b_encoding 1000Mbps is essentially the "net" bit rate available to the Ethernet protocol.
  • ChuckMcM 9y ago
    exactly right. Different standards claim different things, but ethernet tries to do the "right" thing and have the number in the name be the actual number of bits per second you get through the thing. Unlike say serial ports where 9600 bits per second isn't 1200 8 bit bytes per second, its only 960 8 bit bytes per second because of a start bit and stop bit. This can be even worse on serial protocols with forward error correction where up to a third of the bits going across the wire are for error correction and/or clock recovery.