Is a widely used local-area network (LAN) protocol. Ethernet standards comprise of several wiring and signalling variants of the physical layer of the OSI architecture. Twisted pair and fiber optic cabling are often used with switches or hubs allowing transfer rates from 10 megabits per second up to (at present) 1000 megabits per second “gigabit” Ethernet. Systems using Ethernet to communicate will divide the data into a stream of shorter pieces known as frames. Each frame containing source and destination addresses as well as error checking data to confirm that the data has arrived at its destination successfully, if not the frame can then be re-transmitted.
