Gigabit to the Laptop

Renee Bader Niemi, I owe you dinner!

I’ve known Renee for nearly two decades, starting from when she worked on the launch of the Poqet PC, the first MS-DOS palmtop around 1989. At the time, I was executive editor of IDG’s Portable Computing magazine.

After Poqet folded, we worked together again when she was at NEC Technologies’ laptop division, and then through the late 1990s, when she served as a vice president of Xircom, which Intel purchased in 2001.

You can see coverage of a panel discussion that I led on “Palm-Sized, Hand-Held Devices,” at Spring Comdex 1999, with Renee, Bill Witte of 3Com/Palm, and Richard Hall of Handheld PC Magazine.

The last time we talked was mid-2000, when she worked at MobileSys, a wireless messaging startup. We ran a story about MobileSys in the Aug. 1 issue of SD Times. Today, Renee is vice president and general manager of the mobile and entertainment group at Plantronics, which falls outside SD Times’ coverage area.

I remember a conversation that Renee and I had in 1998 or 1999, when Xircom introduced the RealPort 10/100 Network Adapter, an early Fast Ethernet adapter for notebook PCs. That was in the era, hard to believe, when many notebooks still didn’t include Ethernet ports. Renee was the product manager for the RealPort series.

We discussed the technical and consumer implications for Fast Ethernet on a notebook, in an age when there wasn’t much demand for bandwidth to the desktop, other than for large file copies. The next speed bump, Gigabit Ethernet, was super-expensive, and was only found in switch uplinks and a few high-end cards for servers.

During the conversation, I light-heartedly bet Renee dinner that we’d never, ever have Gigabit Ethernet running into a notebook PC. “Why would we ever need it?” I said, or something to that effect. Renee insisted that while it would take a few years, GigE to the notebook would come to pass in less than a decade.

Well, Renee was right. GigE is everywhere today. I realized this morning, when looking at my Gigabit Ethernet workgroup switch, that every computer on the office LAN – including my Apple MacBook Pro – is running Gigabit Ethernet. The only slower devices are things like my laser printer and DSL modem, which use Fast Ethernet.

So, Renee, give me a call. Dinner’s on me!