On Tue, Sep 24, 2013 at 7:26 PM, Ken Schaefer <[email protected]> wrote: > I don't know any 10BaseT ports that are "upgradeable" to 100BaseT or > 1000BaseT.
They're not upgradable. They're backwards and forwards compatible. If I plug my PC with the gigabit NIC into my 20 year old 10 megabit repeater[1], I will get a link at 10 megabits per second, and data will flow. If I could find something to install my 3C503 card into, I could connect that to a brand-new 10GBASE-T switch, and it would link at 10 megabits per second, and data will flow. > Even if they were, somehow, upgradeable (e.g. via a firmware update) ... It's not about making old components somehow "upgrade" into new components. It's about preserving the ability for old components to still work with new components. The case in point is a cell phone. You've seen the PhoneBlox concept sketch. For the sake of discussion, let's pretend any other technical, political, and economic challenges doesn't exist. The only challenge is designing an interconnect for the PhoneBlox components. So: While there are plenty of people who feel a heart-felt need to upgrade to the latest toy, there are plenty of others who either just want the dang thing to work, or want to tinker. It's those latter two groups that PhoneBlox is targeting. If the camera, or the card reader, or the wifi radio, or whatever, breaks, we currently have to throw the entire phone out. PhoneBlox wants to make it so you can just replace the broken component. This doesn't need *any* performance change. There are people who actually *don't* want a camera in their phone. There are others who want a better camera. You don't need a ton of new bandwidth to make a camera work. Even decades-old 100 megabit Ethernet can transfer a multi-megapixel image in a second. There are people who want to increase storage capacity because they have a lot of music/videos -- not because they want to access them all at once. They don't need more bandwidth. Or maybe they want a second SD card slot. Or maybe they want a USB port. Or stereo speakers. Or a hard keyboard. These are not high-performance items. We're not talking enterprise database servers, here. We're talking about a phone. It's okay if it doesn't wring every last ounce of performance possible out of the hardware. > Even if they were, would the battery technology of the time be capable > of supplying a non-trivial amount of power? Battery tech doesn't generally change radically. There are evolutionary improvements, but no revolutionary ones. For the most part, a battery of a given size provides *roughly* the same amount of power that it did five years ago. -- Ben [1] Doesn't everyone have one? It also has a 10BASE2 BNC connector. You never know when you might need that.
