Info about Desktop Computers
How is the Gigabit Ethernet useful to the desktop computers?
Gigabit-to-the-desktop is a vision of deploying GbE end-to-end across a network, and involves installing 1 Gbps NICs into high-performance workstations to provide them with incredibly fast access to network servers. This is still more a dream than a reality, though, because such workstations suffer from the same limitations that were described for servers above, and even more so. The result is that deploying GbE end-to-end across a network generally results in only a marginal improvement over Fast Ethernet in applications performance and greatly complicates the already difficult task of troubleshooting high-speed switched networks. In the old days of shared Ethernet networks, a "sniffer" could be connected to the main hub and traffic on the entire LAN could be analyzed-capturing and analyzing traffic on a switched LAN is much more complicated, and protocol analyzers operating at gigabit speeds are expensive. In any case, gigabit-to-the-desktop is still several years from everyday reality, and most desktop applications can achieve sufficient bandwidth using only Fast Ethernet.
Another hindrance to completely migrating a network's infrastructure from Fast Ethernet to GbE over copper (1000BaseTX) is cabling. Although GbE can theoretically run over existing Category 5 (Cat5) cabling, such cabling usually has not been installed with the care and precision needed to support gigabit signaling speeds. Also, GbE over copper requires the use of all four pairs of wires, whereas some flavors of Fast Ethernet only needed two pairs of wires. As a result, corporate networks often need considerable rewiring to support GbE, and even new deployments using enhanced Category 5 (Cat5e) or Category 6 (Cat6) wiring require exceptional care in how they are installed to ensure that GbE will perform as expected.