Bandwidth limitations of electrical Gigabit Ethernet

Optical network is expected to replace the existing electrical networks. In this paper we analyze the bandwidth limitation of electrical Gigabit Ethernet and show that 1Gbps theoretical limit cannot be achieved using electrical interfaces and therefore optical interfaces are required to achieve high bandwidth. The performance of Gigabit Ethernet depends on the operating system used. IPv6 with Windows XP has the lowest bandwidth of 320Mbps while IPv4 with Windows Vista has the highest bandwidth of 700Mbps for the packet size of 1408 Bytes.