The choice of particular High Speed Network Technology depends on cost and the ease in reconfiguring the existing network structure to accommodate the going technology.

Fast Ethernet and 100VG-AnyLAN are catching up the market faster than the other technologies. The simple reason is cost: While FDDI adapters cost about $1,500 and up for fiber cards, Fast Ethernet and 100VG-AnyLAN network adapters go for well under $300 each. The most compelling reason to buy one of these may be faster access for all networked applications, combined with a reasonable cost of implementation.

While Fast Ethernet and 100VG-AnyLAN are poised to bring 100-Mbps operation to desktops and servers, FDDI and ATM will be making their marks to help shore up the network backbone. FDDI's considerable technical merits, such as its dual-ring architecture and built-in management properties, have made it excellent for backbone installations. Businesses will continue to look to FDDI to link together building- and campus-wide installations.

Fibre Channel LAN delivers higher aggregate throughput than the rest of the technologies. It also exhibits lower latencies for large data transfers. "With transmissions between one and two megabytes,". Fibre Channel has significantly less delay. That's not surprising, since the technology is designed to handle multimegabyte files. When relatively small amounts of data are sent, both networks offer about the same level of delay. For instance, with 4 kbyte transfers both ATM and Fibre Channel have latencies of about 500 microseconds.

An intelligent network manager's job would be to study the different aspects of the different technologies with his network in consideration and chose the one that costs him less both money wise and effort wise,while at the same time seeing to it that the new network doesn't have any problems with the existing hardware setup.