Does firewire support broadcast?

[Steven J. Edwards]

Firewire (IEEE 1394, Sony LLink) is really not intended for general networking.
It is much more like a high speed (serial) SCSI with a pair of power lines
attached.  If you look at the available Firewire peripherals (www.apple.com
is a good start), most are video/multimedia and a few are hard drives.  Even
on consumer computers with Firewire as standard, these also have 100baseTX as
well for networking.

For broadcasting and maybe some other purposes, you might try adding a second
(or maybe third) 100baseTX NIC to some or all the nodes.  Then each originating
node could broadcast simultaneously on two (or more) channels.  The per node
cost of a NIC and a cable is only about five percent of the base node cost, so
it's not too expensive.

Gigabit Ethernet, on the other hand, is much more expensive all around and I
think it's going to stay that way for several years at least as there is not
much of a large scale consumer market to bring down the prices.

-- Steven