Ethernet's value to networking and IT is well established over the past 40 years. But did you know that "Ethernet" refers to two slightly different ways of sending information between endpoints on a LAN? That and some other perhaps lesser known facts about this 40-year-old technology are reviewed here:

Internet traffic will quadruple in five years and the number of mobile Internet connections will exceed the world's population by 2017, according to Cisco research.

While much of the hype for software-defined networking is focused on large-scale data center deployments, some companies are taking a different angle.

The third annual Open Networking Summit, an SDN conference organized by the Open Networking Foundation, convened this week just after ONF members Cisco and IBM unveiled a separate effort to define an open source SDN framework. Unlike the user-driven ONF, OpenDaylight is a vendor-driven project to cultivate a system of SDN applications, but it also raised suspicion of the group's real intent: Is it designed to stall SDN's momentum and the threat, real or perceived, it could pose to incumbent hardware vendors? ONF Executive Director Dan Pitt discussed some of these topics with Network World Managing Editor Jim Duffy at the Santa Clara, Calif., conference.

Huawei Technologies' enterprise division is ramping up its European presence, helped by the announcement this week that SAP has certified the company's servers to run its HANA in-memory platform. Such deals with SAP and other big software vendors will be key for Huawei to succeed in the enterprise.

Dell this week extended its data center networking portfolio with a new top-of-rack switch and plans to extend OpenFlow support for software-defined networking across its product line.

Hewlett-Packard will allow enterprises to pay for managed LAN offerings based on usage, in much the same way they pay for cloud services, through a partnership with telecom service providers.

Republic Wireless on Tuesday launched a limited beta program of its $19-a-month hybrid wireless service using, to start, the LG Optimus smartphone running Android 2.3.

Home is where the network is: That's the mantra of networking vendors at the Consumer Electronics Show 2011 in Las Vegas this week.