On Monday, July 11, 2011 01:47:09 PM John R Pierce wrote: > it was my understanding that 'hubs' were only supported on 10baseT and > 100baseT ethernets, .... > GigE mandates switching and full > duplex. Anyone using fiber for 10 or 100baseF is stuck in the last > century. Or stuck with >550m multimode fiber links (we have a few of those; longest is over 1km, and only multimode ran to that location). The 10Mb/s standard is (heading from IEEE 802.3-2008): 16. Fiber optic passive star and medium attachment unit, type 10BASE-FP 802.3-2008 clause 41 provides for a half-duplex 1000Mb/s repeater, but it is noted that no maintenance changes are being accepted since May 2007 for that clause. And then, of course, there are EPON and GPON, but that's passive full duplex using WDM technologies with the passive splitters and combiners (typical fiber to the premises gear). GBIC's and SFP's are available for media converters and switches; if a GigE NIC has an SFP slot it might be possible to support those technologies at the workstation or server. No, switching isn't mandated; while the 802.3 standard is pretty dense, it is now freely available from IEEE for anyone to download and look at.