3Com speeds up

3Com finally arrived at the gigabit Ethernet party being thrown by small businesses everywhere. Although lagging behind other SME favourites such as Linksys and Netgear, and even HP, at least 3Com appeared, reports Network World.

When early gigabit switches appeared in the small business space, they tended to have a 1Gb port for a server and 10/100Mbps ports for users.

If users do little besides e-mail and office productivity applications, that may still be fine. However, anyone doing audio or video file manipulation, or moving large files around regularly, will appreciate the advantages of a gigabit switch.

Belief in the telecoms industry that businesses would energetically seize the opportunity to move towards full Internet Protocol (IP) networking have proven unfounded, says Silicon Republic.

Instead, cost-conscious firms are deploying hybrid IP networks as part of upgrades.

"Going back to 1999, we expected people to swiftly migrate to an all-IP world. But instead, customers have gone for a more hybrid approach, combining traditional network infrastructure with elements of IP," explained Stephen Hobson, sales director for Western Europe at Swedish telecoms equipment manufacturer Ericsson.

As the migration to high definition (HD) picks up speed, video system designers are faced with new challenges related to bandwidth requirements, image quality, transcoding and digital media codec flexibility, reports EE Times.

In order of magnitude, more processing power is required to encode and decode HD video than standard-definition (SD) video. Whereas a single DSP can handle a stream of SD video encode/decode, for example, up to five may be needed for HD720p at 30 frames per second (fps), and 12 to 13 DSPs may be required for HD1080p at 30fps.

No one has a trickier set of problems to solve than designers whose systems interface with the IP network, or private networks, to transmit video to distant endpoints. IP-based videoconferencing is one of the most obvious examples of this application.