mii-tool and dsl?

[Eric Diamond]

It's actually an chip level engineering decision. The current trend is
to build custom chipsets for this type of applicaton. The idea is to
pack as many features in as few chips as possible. This increases
manufacturing yields (fewer components == fewer places for something to
go wrong) and product lifetimes (less power == less heat dissipation ==
longer lasting electronics).

Current cable modem and DSL router chipsets have the ethernet port
integrated into the same chip as the cable/DSL tranceiver. Since the
troughput will never even come close to 10Mbps, they can't justify the
extra chip realestate it would take to implement a 100Mbps interface,
not to mention the extra buffering needed to convert from 100Mbps to
128Kbps (OK some have higher rates, but I haven't seen any DSL go higher
than 7Mbps) on the upstream side.

Eric Diamond
eDiamond Networking & Security
303-246-9555
eric at ediamond.net