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Gigabit Ethernet is a networking standard based on Ethernet-standard packets of information sent over optical fibres or ordinary twisted-pair cabling at up to 1,000Mbps. The standard goes by a couple of names, 1000Base-T for ordinary copper cabling, or 1000Base-X for fibres or special balanced cables. Also known as 802.3z and 802.3ab, Gigabit Ethernet uses the same signaling speed as 100Mbps Ethernet but uses all four pairs of wires in the cable and a more efficient modulation scheme to get 10 times the performance. To use Gigabit Ethernet, you'll need new network interface cards and hubs, switches and/or routers. The rest of the Ethernet standard is as before. --ZDnet
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