Quote:
That would be true, if the switches and interfaces were all powered off between packets.

Dream on.

Well, I guess I'm assuming that most of the power use is in the line drivers. In all varieties of Ethernet, from 10base2 to 1000baseT, the line drivers are powered off, not merely between packets, but also between bits. That's how the collision detection works. (In practice, all GigE equipment seems to be full-duplex and switched, so no collisions happen. But the standard allows for half-duplex and for hubs.)

Peter