Differences between Ethernet Fast Ethernet and Gigabit Ethernet?

Answer 1

The 'Ether' part of Ethernet denotes that the system is not meant to be restricted for use on only one medium type, copper cables, fibre cables and even radio waves can be used.

Fast Ethernet Network was developed as an upgrade to traditional Ethernet Networking. Fast Ethernet improved traditional Ethernet by increasing transfer rates 10 times, from 10 Megabit to 100 Megabit speed.

Gigabit Ethernet Network is an upgrade on Fast Ethernet Network equivalent to Fast Ethernet Networks improvement over Fast Ethernet Network, offering speeds of 1000 Megabits (1 Gigabit)

Cisco have a good document with diagrams and a reasonable amount of depth that answers your questions on 10/100/1000 Ethernet. See related link.

Ethernet card would be 10Mbps (mega bauds per second) Fast Ethernet card would be 100Mbps. Most ethernet cards sold today are Fast Ethernet or better. Look for the 100Mbps or the 10/100Mbps specification. The only difference between the both is the speed.

Hence both cards are basically the same using the same technology except the fast Ethernet card can run on 10/100mb/s, an astonishing speed.

Original 10Base2, 10Base5 and 10baseT Ethernet (thin coaxial cable, thick coaxial cable and twisted pair, respectively) specifications offered a 10Mbit/second throughput (data transfer rate). Although 1 Byte is 8 bits, 10Mbits in practice doesn't mean 1.25MBytes/second, because there's some extra information transferred. On average it can be seen as a ~1MByte/second link speed.

Then new standards appeared, some of them exotic (like 100VG AnyLan), but the new Ethernet standard was 100baseTX, which used twisted pair (like 10baseT, but with slightly higher quality requirements - Category 5 cable). It has been called Fast Ethernet, as it offered 100Mbit/sec transfer speed, a 10-fold improvement. Usually all the network equipment can talk both 10baseT and 100baseTX (for example network switches have "10/100" ports).

But this was not enough - then came a next speed-up: the 1000baseTX, still running on twisted pair, but with even higher cable quality requirements, offering 1000Mbit/s transfer speed, thus called Gigabit Ethernet: 1000 Mega = 1 Giga.