Intel slashes GE adapters to $99

Intel has slashed the price of Gigabit Ethernet adapters in a bid to accelerate the widespread take up of the technology.

Intel has slashed the price of Gigabit Ethernet (GE) adapters in a bid to accelerate the widespread take up of the technology.

The company has announced that it will sell a desktop adapter for the suggested retail price of $99. It will also offer a server adapter. Both products are optimised for common copper networks.

Intel claims that the adapters will help alleviate various network bottlenecks created by bandwidth intensive applications such as data warehousing, IP storage and video streaming.

"As customers upgrade servers and desktops to Intel's multi Gigabit processors, they also need to scale network bandwidth to GE levels. This provides a balanced, high performance environment," said Greg Lang, vice president and general manager of Intel's Platform Networking Group.

"We expect Intel's new adapters to help accelerate the deployment of GE by providing customers with up to 10 times the performance of Fast Ethernet on standard copper networks for less than $100," he added.

But Jon Collins, of Sundial Consultancy, said he was not convinced that network managers needed GE.

"Intel is trying to persuade people to buy something that they don't need. Cost really isn't an issue. If the technology is relevant, managers will purchase it. There is no point having such large bandwidth in your network if you don't have that kind of data traffic," he explained.

According to research from Cahners InStat, the GE adapter market segment grew by 287 per cent in 2000. The overall GE adapter market is forecast to grow from $168m in 2001 to $1.7bn in 2005.