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A family of networking technologies for LANs. Ethernet encompasses bother the physical connection between devices and part of the protocols which define how the connected devices can communicate.

Ethernet is based on the idea of points of the network by sending the message boards, in what is essentially similar to a radio system, captive of a common wire or channel, formerly called the ether. This is an oblique reference to the luminiferous ether, the means by which nineteenth-century physicists believed light traveled.

Each point has a key 48-bit globally unique address known as MAC, to ensure that all systems in an Ethernet have distinct addresses.

It has been observed that Ethernet traffic has self-similarity properties, with important consequences for traffic engineering telecommunications. Current standards of the Ethernet protocol are as follows:

  • 10 megabits / sec: 10Base-T Ethernet (IEEE 802.3)
  • 100 megabits / sec Fast Ethernet (IEEE 802.3u)
  • 1 gigabit / sec: Gigabit Ethernet (IEEE 802.3z)
  • 10 gigabits / sec: 10 Gigabit Ethernet (IEEE 802.3ae)