Gigabit Ethernet?

You know when you go to apple's online store and you click on your dream machine (powerbook, G5, etc.) and you supe it up, just to see how ridiculously amazing you can make it? (I think everyone does this) Anyway, I did this with the top of the line G5 and noticed that you can get a card for Gigabit Ethernet!

Now you can shoot me if you'd like (no not really) cause I thought Gigabit Ethernet was just a prototype, an unfinished, underdeveloped, under-advertised, piece of gold that would eventually blow me into seizures upon surfing the internet that was decades from being unleashed.
:tusks:

Ok, so here's my question:

What's the protocol for this god-fast internet that'll give us all unhealthy doses of radiation?

It's for networking not internet access.

There's a little misunderstanding here...
It's Gigabit Ethernet...not Internet.
It's the maximum speed of the network card. Actual standards are 10/100Mbit, PowerMacs since the G4 Gigabit Ethernet (hence the name) have 10/100/1000Mbit Ethernet controllers. 1000Mbit=1Gbit.

But that still doesn't mean your Internet connection would be that fast. Even an old 10Mbit card is still faster than broadband Internet.

Wow, that clears alot up!

Thanks

I read an article at www.torrentspy.com saying that 1gigabyte per second internet was being unveiled in Hong Kong soon.

PowerBooks have Gigabit ethernet in them

These require Cat6 networking cables (You rarely see above Cat5) and either a Gigabit internet connection (which doesn't exist) or a Gigabit router connected to another computer with a gigabit ethernet card and cable for you to get any advantage of it

THe company that I use to work for added a whole wing to their building and did the main public in cat5, but the server room was built in that wing and redone to almost all cat6 - gigabit ethernet. Server communication was so fast. I couldn't even imagine what the cost would have been to switch over to gb cat 6 backbone.

CAT6 is stil quite "reasonnably" priced. Our company backbone has fiberoptic cables (10Gbit/s!!) which must have cost a little fortune...