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ABSTRACT Local area networks have been dominated by Ethernet for many years. With the ever-increasing demand for higher speeds in all areas of technology including networking, this popular standard has been enhanced to run at 100 Mbps. Accordingly, it was named Fast Ethernet. Today, further evolution of the Ethernet standard is being completed which will change the speed to 1000 Mbps. This is the Gigabit Ethernet. This paper describes how Ethernet and Gigabit Ethernet work, respectively. In addition, both standards are compared, and the differences are analyzed for their significance. The overall purpose of the article is to determine if the changes to the original Ethernet are minor, and if it is valid to still call it Ethernet, or if it should be regarded as something completely different. Comparison of Ethernet and Gigabit Ethernet INTRODUCTION Ethernet is the world's most widespread networking technology. It is estimated that in 1996, 82% of all networking equipment shipped was Ethernet [1]. In 1995, the Fast Ethernet Standard was approved by the IEEE. Fast Ethernet provided 10 times higher bandwidth, and other new features such as full duplex operation, and auto negotiation. This established Ethernet as a