In message <20021201082612.GA17638@bcd.geek.com.au>Daniel Carosone writes

[FEC]
Isn't Cisco's FEC proprietary?

>This used to be quite common for servers onto a lan of many clients,
>but is generally done with GigE instead these days. I haven't yet
>seen the equivalent bundling for Gig-E ports.

IEEE 802.1ad, aka "gigabit ethernet port trunking".  Various
configurations allow for for load-balancin (tho the IEEE rules are,
perhaps, overly strict for an IP network), or failover for redundancy.

Paging Jason....