7 ms·
The point was more about competing technical choices made by designers, rather than the choice of standards made by consumers. For example TDMA can be arguably
by Sporktacular 4y ago
The point was more about competing technical choices made by designers, rather than the choice of standards made by consumers. For example TDMA can be arguably more scalable, bandwidth and energy efficient than CSMA/CD and can give consistent PL, PD and PDV, so might have even allowed early business grade voice. Variable header sizes would have allowed efficient use over bandwidth constrained media like radio. But the low cost and fast success of Ethernet formed a barrier to entry for competing LAN standards, where those arguably better technical choices may have found a footing.
They eventually found application in other non-LAN standards, so guess royalties weren't an issue.
- RF_Savage 4y agoTDMA needs time synchronization and thus becomes more complex. Even in telecoms the packet switched connections are quickly replacing synchronous time division connections.
- jabl 4y agoThe recent-ish 10base-t1 uses something called PLCA instead of CSMA/CD which doesn't require time synchronization, and gives each node in a subnet a dedicated transmission slot.
- RF_Savage 4y ago10Base-T1L is point to point, 10Base-T1S is multidrop, but very limited in nodes and how long the branches/stubs can be. We'll see how it actually performs in field. Microchip seems to be in the T1S boat and TI+AD in T1L.
- xenadu02 4y agoNone of those things could be implemented in the 1970 or 1980s at reasonable cost so they're not actually solutions at all. Hell even making Ethernet fully switched didn't really happen until the 1990s thanks to Moore's law making the ASICs cheap enough. Without mass adoption there's no reason to invest. Look at Token Ring, Ethernet's only real competitor at scale: it quickly started to lag behind. Ethernet shipped 100Mbps several years before Token Ring. The 1Gbps Token Ring standard was never put to hardware.
- Sporktacular 4y agoTDMA is an extension of TDM, which goes back to the 60's. Synchronization was already solved. Variable header size could be implemented with the same preamble concept already used by Ethernet, but used to indicate the end of the header. These were not hard problems. The technology existed, the affordability would have largely depended on adoption, so it's hard to say.
- xenadu02 4y agoWe'll have to agree to disagree. Obviously TDM was known but implementing it for ethernet at a reasonable cost was just not an option at the time (in my opinion).