Comment by PeterWhittaker

Oh, flashback to learning queueing theory decades ago!

In principle, token ring was faster than Ethernet (which was CSMA/CD in the day): the mathematics of token ring were exact and analytic, and, when solved, gave higher speeds and better reliability than Ethernet, the mathematics of which were so complex (think three-body-problem) that analytic solutions were available only for bounding equations, which resolved to slower than token ring.

In practice, Ethernet was much faster.

A classic "the model is not the territory" problem.