THE ETHERNET
	Developed at Xerox PARC in 1973. It's a standard for Media Access Control (MAC) sublayer. Data transmission rate : 10 Mbits/s (Fast Ethernet reaches 100 Mbit/s) High-speed driver on the computers connected by coax or UTP cables. Uses a bus (10base2, coax, max. distance 200 mt.) or a star (10baseT, UTP, max. 100 mt.) topology. Can be optical fibres based too (10baseF , max. 2000 mt.). How it works? All nodes wanting to send message contention for the bus. Broadcast frames to all stations on the network. All stations are continually listening to the bus looking for frames addressed to them. Variable length frames : 64 to 1518 bytes. Transmission time : 50 - 1200 microsec. Do you want to see a more detailed description of the Ethernet?