THE highly touted information superhighway is already in place, while Fast Ethernet's time has come, according to Paul Sherer, director of technology development at US networking giant 3Com Corp.
While this may be good news to computer users, Mr Sherer said the current set of electronic conduits could not yet be considered a superhighway. Characterising it as ''fragmented'', he said: ''There are two major issues to face in developing the superhighway: how many lanes are to be constructed, and what services are to be provided at offramps''.
In fact, computer users around the globe have been communicating across the present highway for quite some time. Such communication has taken the form of E-mail, and users in a specialised industry segment co-operating on a project, or simply exchanging information, he added.
As an example of the latter, he cited a case where 600 members of the Fast Ethernet Alliance located all over the world were working on a single document. Here, 3Com set up an E-mail distribution list according to the individual user's interests.
While this was certainly impressive, Mr Sherer conceded that there was still a long way to go.
''It would take a while to send a giant file across the US,'' he said.