Talk:Ethernet

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	Ethernet was a Engineering and technology good articles nominee, but did not meet the good article criteria at the time. There may be suggestions below for improving the article. Once these issues have been addressed, the article can be renominated. Editors may also seek a reassessment of the decision if they believe there was a mistake.
Article milestones Date Process Result September 11, 2011 Peer review Reviewed November 29, 2011 Good article nominee Not listed
	Facts from this article were featured on Wikipedia's Main Page in the "On this day..." column on September 30, 2004, September 30, 2005, September 30, 2006, September 30, 2007, September 30, 2011, and September 30, 2016.
Current status: Former good article nominee

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This article is substantially duplicated in one or more external publications. Since these publication(s) copied Wikipedia, rather than the reverse, please do not flag this article as a copyright violation of the following source: Shuangbao, Paul Wang; et al. (2012), Computer Architecture and Security: Fundamentals of Designing Secure Computer Systems (PDF) Additional comments The sections "repeaters and hubs" and "bridging and switching" are copied entirely into the book, with no attribution.

This article is substantially duplicated in one or more external publications. Since these publication(s) copied Wikipedia, rather than the reverse, please do not flag this article as a copyright violation of the following source: Krishan Kumar Raman & J. P. Panwar (2012), Data Communications and Network Systems Additional comments Starting with the Standardization section the book (page 141, first edition, 2012) directly quotes the wikipedia article of December 10, 2011, down at least to Repeaters and Bridges.

This is copied from my talk page and answered here per WP:BRD ~Kvng (talk) 14:51, 27 November 2020 (UTC)

Hi,

Please let me know why you reverted my edit for the page Ethernet. Generally, people are used to seeing representations of data (and their rates) in bytes, not bits. I felt that adding the speeds in bytes as notes was a good compromise.

Thanks.

DesertPipeline (talk) 07:34, 27 November 2020 (UTC)

While computer and storage performance is often specified in byte/s, network engineers work most frequently in bit/s. The alternate units with similar-sounding names can be confusing and are not frequently used in the field. Your casting them as notes will exasperate those who have criticized this article for having too many notes. ~Kvng (talk) 14:51, 27 November 2020 (UTC)

Generally it has seemed to me that the only usage of bits has been by ISPs. Am I incorrect? As a few examples of networking speeds measured in bytes, the proprietary game distribution program Steam uses bytes when measuring download speed, as does Speedtest.net (I believe?). (Edit: It does not use bytes). Regarding 'too many notes', I can understand that sentiment, but if notes provide useful explanations not exactly necessary to understand the article proper, it's better to have 'too many' of them rather than dumping the information directly into the article body or simply getting rid of them. I would be fine with the speeds in bytes being in brackets after each speed in bits, but because it isn't strictly necessary information, I don't want to clutter the article body with them, but I do feel that they are helpful additions. Your thoughts?

Thanks.

DesertPipeline (talk) 17:31, 27 November 2020 (UTC)

Against byte/s – Seconding Knvg here – in networking, only bit/s is used generally and throughout. Our aim should be to provide clear and useful information for the reader, and since professionally only bit/s is ever used, references to byte/s wouldn't do much good there. --Zac67 (talk) 18:28, 27 November 2020 (UTC)

Against byte/s – Section 1.2.3 "Physical Layer and media notation" of IEEE Std 803.3-2018 says:

Users of this standard need to reference which particular implementation is being used or identified. Therefore, a means of identifying each implementation is given by a simple, three-field, type notation that is explicitly stated at the beginning of each relevant clause. In general, the Physical Layer type is specified by these fields:

<data rate> <modulation type> <additional distinction>

The data rate, if only a number, is in Mb/s, and if suffixed by a “G”, is in Gb/s. The modulation type (e.g., BASE) indicates how encoded data is transmitted on the medium. The additional distinction may identify characteristics of transmission or medium and, in some cases, the type of PCS encoding used (examples of additional distinctions are “T” for twisted pair, “B” for bidirectional optics, and “X” for a block PCS coding used for that speed of operation). Expansions for defined Physical Layer types are included in 1.4.

and the sections on various PHY laters give speeds in bits/s or multiples thereof.

(This is not unique to Ethernet. 802.11, for example, also gives PHY bit rates rather than byte rates.)

There's no "125 megabyte Ethernet" page; instead, there's a Gigabit Ethernet page.

So, yes, you are incorrect when you say that bit rates are used only by ISPs; bits are used when discussing LANs, for example. Guy Harris (talk) 19:54, 27 November 2020 (UTC)

For networking hardware, and it seems ISP advertizing, it does seem that bits are used. For user software though, such as ftp and wget, in bytes/second. Since this article is on the hardware level it does seem that bits are appropriate, but it might also be worth noting the difference and when people should know to multiply/divide by 8. Gah4 (talk) 20:00, 27 November 2020 (UTC)

At the physical layer, rates are generally in bits/second. User software generally runs atop a transport layer; that layer, or layers below it, generally provide a physical-layer independent service and, in practice, are transferring data a byte at a time, so they tend to give the rates in bytes/second. Guy Harris (talk) 20:09, 27 November 2020 (UTC)

Directories for most OS give file size in bytes, or sometimes blocks. As far as I know, the places where software gives rates, it knows bytes (because that is how OS keep track of things) and divides by the time needed. Gah4 (talk) 23:40, 27 November 2020 (UTC)

Have a look at OSI model. Ethernet covers layers 1 and 2. Bits are the commonly used unit at those layers. FTP, HTTP via wget, and so on are at layer 7, where different terminology tends to be used. MrOllie (talk) 00:02, 28 November 2020 (UTC)

With notably rare exceptions, CPU instruction sets these days work in octets; working in bits would be a real stretch. :-) As such, OSes keep track of file sizes and the like in octets.

However, at the link layer, Linux "ethtool <interface>" shows the interface speed in Mb/s, for example, as does Windows 10's network settings GUI.

So, again, it's a function of the layer you're at, as per what MrOllie said. Guy Harris (talk) 00:45, 28 November 2020 (UTC)

Some link layer tools also give the total bytes sent/received ... not bits. Gah4 (talk) 01:40, 28 November 2020 (UTC)

Which link-layer tools are those? The BSD netstat, when given an interval argument of n in seconds, reports "bytes" in and out every n seconds - but I'm not sure that's "bytes" counting link-layer headers, so it may just be a count of the number of bytes that the IPv4/IPv6/ARP/etc. layers handed to it or that were handed to those layers, in which case that'd be above the data link protocol layer. Guy Harris (talk) 01:53, 28 November 2020 (UTC)

In my opinion, regardless of what the standards are when it comes to data transfer rates and how we measure them, it's worthwhile information for the article to mention what the speeds are in bytes. Recently I used a search engine to determine how many people get confused by the usage of bits rather than bytes by ISPs, and I found quite a few results where people wondered why they were not getting the speed they were paying for (because it was in bits and they did not know the difference between bits and bytes, especially because the ISPs did not specify bits, only using "Mb" or "Gb" which to the untrained user who has only ever heard of "megabytes" and "gigabytes" might assume it means that, despite being written MB and GB respectively in that case). Perhaps the article doesn't strictly need the information, because conversion is relatively easy, but some readers might not be aware that conversion is even necessary, or what the conversion rate is. Perhaps my logic is flawed here, but I don't think it does any harm to have the information in the article. I'm probably biased because I made the edit, but I do consider it to be "useful" myself. Of course, if consensus is that it is not useful, then I'll accept that. DesertPipeline (talk) 02:38, 28 November 2020 (UTC)

Reminds me, before the Hz unit frequencies were commonly in megacycles (or kilocycles), with the "per second" implied. But yes, this is common in networking where there is 10 megabit ethernet, also leaving off the "per second". Seems to me that we don't need to put conversions on the units, but an explanation of the difference and the confusion it causes might be nice. Gah4 (talk) 03:57, 28 November 2020 (UTC)

The only guarantee offered by the speed of most if not all PHY layers is "guaranteed not to exceed". :-) And even if you're lucky enough to get the full link-layer speed, there may be network-layer and transport-layer that will eat some of that bandwidth, plus, if there are any routers/switches/bridges involved, those may slow things down, and the host from which you're fetching the data may not be able to provide data at full speed.

My DSL modem is currently reporting a download bandwidth of 5984 Kb/s, which is 748 KB/s, but I never see that much when downloading.

So the best way to fix that confusion may be to have ISPs provide an explanation that mentions not only b/s vs. B/s, but also all the other overheads, and "by the way, the server from which you're downloading might not be able to run at full network speed". (And if you're directly connected to the modem by Ethernet, the Ethernet's speed is probably not going to be the limiting factor for downloads, so this page might not be the best place to address an issue with people understanding the data rate their ISP is offering.) Guy Harris (talk) 04:08, 28 November 2020 (UTC)

So is the consensus here not to make the change to list the speed in bytes as well? DesertPipeline (talk) 15:08, 8 December 2020 (UTC)

Either that or we can call this no consensus in which case we also don't make the change. ~Kvng (talk) 17:14, 11 December 2020 (UTC)

User:Kvng Hi again. I have two different proposals for the different measurement units that I just thought up. If neither are to your liking, no problem, we can leave it at that. Obviously, these proposals only solve the issue of having two many notes, and they don't solve the issue of 'we don't need to say it in the first place'. Personally I feel the information would be useful, but if everyone else is of the opinion that it's not necessary, I understand. At the very least with proposal two it doesn't have to be implemented here but could be implemented generally for other purposes.

With this proposal we'd add the tooltip template to the numbers, like so:

2.94 megabits per second 400 gigabits per second

There may be a way to make it so "2.94 megabits per second" has the tooltip while only "megabits per second" has the wikilink, but I'm not sure how.

With this proposal we'd make a new conversion template suitable for all types of measurement units. Usage would be inserting something into the template and specifying what unit of measurement it is, then the template automatically converts it and gives readers a small button to click, which produces a box similar to what you'd see when mousing over a reference, which shows corresponding conversions. Ideally this could be used all over Wikipedia for other purposes as well, such as distance.

Please let me know if either of these are to your liking.

Thanks, DesertPipeline (talk) 17:03, 29 December 2020 (UTC)

@DesertPipeline: I personally don't think conversions of any type are needed where you placed them in this article. I'm not sure what the WP:MOS has to say about the tooltip proposal. Often clever ideas like this get shot down because of WP:ACCESSIBILITY concerns. It is possible bit-to-byte conversions may be useful somewhere else and, if so, a Category:Convert-like templates might be helpful. I would identify where it would be used before going to the trouble of creating it. ~Kvng (talk) 20:16, 29 December 2020 (UTC)

Do you have any suggestions as to where else in the article it could go? (Off-topic) By the way, speaking of accessibility, I think this talk section might not be conforming to an accessibility guideline, although I can't remember what it is. Something to do with each list item (the colon symbol making a list) needing to be 'attached' to the last one. We have gaps between our comments sometimes here. Is that something we need to fix? DesertPipeline (talk) 05:53, 30 December 2020 (UTC)

DesertPipeline, these conversions are covered in Bit rate which is linked in the first paragraph of the lead here. I think this is adequate treatment of the issue.

I haven't seen anyone try to apply WP:ACCESSIBILITY to talk pages. ~Kvng (talk) 14:18, 1 January 2021 (UTC)

Fair enough, I'll concede the non-inclusion of my changes then. Also, what I read is on the page you linked: WP:Accessibility#Lists. I think if I do it this way (putting the list item indicators in the whitespace as well) that prevents accessibility issues for screen readers. I'm not sure if I'm actually supposed to be placing a gap between my comments and yours though. Can you advise me on the matter? DesertPipeline (talk) 17:03, 1 January 2021 (UTC)

I agree with Kvng, no real need to change from bits per second. Network speeds are never specified in bytes per second. Quote from a standard text (Peterson and Davie): "When we talk about the bandwidth of a communication link, we normally refer to the number of bits persecond that can be transmitted on the link. This is also sometimes called the data rate. We might say that the bandwidth of an Ethernet link is 10 Mbps"

Also quote from Verizon in an ad for FIOS: "Learn about Fios Gigabit Connection” - anyone using a network should try to learn what the speeds mean. Ngriffeth (talk) 18:10, 7 November 2025 (UTC)

This is not really covered - Why isn't WiFi considered to be Ethernet? Where is it defined that only cabled technologies are considered to be Ethernet? Ethernet is not defined purely at layer 1. So if WiFi uses the same layer 2 frames over a different layer 1 media, why is itnot Ethernet? Commking (talk) 09:12, 31 March 2021 (UTC)

"So if WiFi uses the same layer 2 frames over a different layer 1 media," Define "same layer 2 frames". The Ethernet and 802.11 MAC headers are not the same, for example. Guy Harris (talk) 09:32, 31 March 2021 (UTC)

Ethernet is what is defined by the IEEE 802.3 work group with the data link layer defined/expanded in IEEE 802.1 (which is similarly used by multiple 802 PHY families). Wi-Fi is defined in 802.11. --Zac67 (talk) 10:44, 31 March 2021 (UTC)

WiFi has been referred to as Wireless Ethernet so I wouldn't rule it out as a type of Ethernet. We don't have a definition for Ethernet here because this is an encyclopedia, not a dictionary and I don't think we'd find a consensus of sources that agree on a definition. ~Kvng (talk) 16:39, 1 April 2021 (UTC)

If Wi-Fi is a type of Ethernet, why isn't Token Ring a type of Ethernet? The physical layer and MAC layer are different from those of Ethernet, but the same is true of Wi-Fi. Guy Harris (talk) 19:34, 1 April 2021 (UTC)

We should probably not do this. Just because Wikipedia thinks ASCII is a form of Morse Code, doesn't make it so. --Wtshymanski (talk) 19:49, 1 April 2021 (UTC)

Guy Harris, strong point ~Kvng (talk) 22:29, 1 April 2021 (UTC)

Interesting. I can put WiFi and wired ethernet in the same layer 2 broadcast domain and communicate directly without routing - and yet the frames are different? Learning all the time. Commking (talk) 23:43, 5 April 2021 (UTC)

Yes, bridges between link layers always using 802.2 LLC (most non-Ethernet link layers) and link layers not always using 802.2 LLC (mainly Ethernet) have to do some frame translation (adding or removing an 802.2 LLC header), and bridges between any two non-identical link layers have to deal with non-data frames (which generally means "don't forward them if they don't have an equivalent on the other link layer") and other link-layer dependent header information. Guy Harris (talk) 00:56, 6 April 2021 (UTC)

Yup, among other differences the Wi-Fi frame structure has no less than four address fields.

GliderMaven (talk) 00:58, 6 April 2021 (UTC)

@Kvng: Even though you can read "Wireless Ethernet" here and there, it's not a thing. Ethernet is generally wired. Wi-Fi uses a distinctive frame format and is vastly different from Ethernet at a low level. There's actually not too much in common, apart from both being MAC-based IEEE 802 standards. --Zac67 (talk) 21:27, 1 April 2021 (UTC)

Arguably Ethernet and Wi-Fi are both types of ALOHAnet ;) GliderMaven (talk) 22:18, 1 April 2021 (UTC)

This is a really interesting question, because Bob Metcalfe’s original concept of Ethernet (and his reason for choosing that name) was that it could run over any medium, not just wired. And of course Ethernet has been modified (under project 802) to run over all sorts of wired media, from coax cables to twisted pairs to fiber.

A wireless protocol, ALOHANet, was Metcalfe’s inspiration for Ethernet. The essential behavior that Ethernet borrowed from ALOHANet was that nodes would send frames over the medium and then check if they made it to the destination - no collision avoidance (I’m exaggerating a little, a node does check if someone else is already sending, but there’s a delay that prevents that check from working infallibly). The spirit of token ring is quite different, that’s a collision avoidance protocol. A node must have the token in order to send.

So - since WiFi was developed in the same spirit as Ethernet - send frames, worry about collisions later - it’s quite reasonable to call it Wireless Ethernet. Also since Ethernet was inspired by a wireless protocol.

Considered abstractly (ignorimg frame formats), Ethernet (802.3) and WiFi (802.11) are almost identical. Ngriffeth (talk) 18:28, 7 November 2025 (UTC)

I'm not sure I consider "they both use collision detection" to be sufficient to say "they're both Ethernet". I view it as more like "a wireless network sharing some characteristics with Ethernet". Guy Harris (talk) 21:31, 7 November 2025 (UTC)

I don't think we'll have much success defining Ethernet as a CSMA/CD protocol. I still believe we'll have trouble providing a solid Ethernet definition. Second, WiFi doesn't have collision detection like the original Ethernet; It can't really because of the hidden node problem. Instead, it uses a layer-2 automatic repeat request protocol to detect and recover from collisions. ~Kvng (talk) 15:05, 10 November 2025 (UTC)

How do we add the book mentioned here to the box at the top of talk?

For several days, the only reference I could find mentioning Robinson, Arst, and Printis as submitting the DIX standard to IEEE 802.3 committee was in Data Communications and Network Systems by Krishan Kumar Raman & J. P. Panwar  P 141, first edition published in 2012.   Starting with the Standardization section the book directly quotes the wikipedia article of December 10, 2011, down at least to Repeaters and Bridges. The exact wording in wikipedia goes back to Mar 30, 2009, so clearly the wikipedia text wasn't taken from, and didn't rely on, the book. The authors of the book must have taken the text from wikipedia, not the other way around, so there’s no way we can use this book as a reference.

How do we add this book to the box at the top of the Talk page? Ngriffeth (talk) 20:58, 10 November 2025 (UTC)

What I found, not obviously copied from WP:

• a personal account by Robinson , a primary source (feels genuine though)
• a 2017 presentation from IEEE 802
• a personal account by Dave Walden, yet edited by Robinson

-- Zac67 (talk) 21:10, 13 November 2025 (UTC)

That first one is the one I found. First person accounts are less than ideal, but none of the third person stories mention the names, only the events, which do match up.

Thanks for the other two!

Do you know, is it acceptable to just edit the box to include the plagiarized book?

On a related subject, there’s a later paragraph that says David Liddle enthusiastically supported Fritz Roscheisen in taking the standard to ECMA. Liddle’s personal account at https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/2013/05/102746649-05-01-acc.pdf doesn’t really support this. I think maybe youe second reference solves the problem I’ve been having finding a better source for this. Ngriffeth (talk) 21:59, 13 November 2025 (UTC)

I've added this to the top of this talk page. {{Backwards copy}} doesn't handle multiple items well (only one |comments= for all entries) so, at least for now, we have multiple boxes. ~Kvng (talk) 16:05, 16 November 2025 (UTC)

Just a warning, parts of your second citation (the 2017 presentation from IEEE 802) were clearly taken from the wikipedia Ethernet article - some copied - on page 9. He credits some other wikipedia articles, I think it was an unintentional omission. But it makes me leery of citing it. Ngriffeth (talk) 21:32, 17 November 2025 (UTC)

Is there a specific reason the Ethernet (802.3) header isn't explained thoroughly or illustrated in this article, or would including it be a beneficial addition? It would make sense to create a graph for the header, so the reader can see the structure at a first glance, and that it's not necessary to read the whole paragraph. Chronic1 (talk) 22:06, 17 November 2025 (UTC)

Is there a specific reason the Ethernet (802.3) header isn't explained thoroughly Ethernet is the top-level article for the topic, and doesn't need to describe all the details; Ethernet frame gives the details, just as Ethernet doesn't describe the details of all Ethernet physical layers, that's covered in other articles. Guy Harris (talk) 00:12, 18 November 2025 (UTC)

The redirect Ethernet cable has been listed at redirects for discussion to determine whether its use and function meets the redirect guidelines. Readers of this page are welcome to comment on this redirect at Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2025 December 1 § Ethernet cable until a consensus is reached. Thepharoah17 (talk) 16:40, 1 December 2025 (UTC)