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The Road to 100 Gigabit Ethernet
darthcamaro writes "InternetNews is reporting that a grassroots effort is being formed to push 100 Gigabit Ethernet into the mainstream. That's 10x faster than the current fastest Ethernet standard 10 GbE and 1000 times faster than "FastEthernet" but it's not going to be here anytime soon. From the article: '"A group of companies have formed to approach the IEEE to get a vote within the IEEE body to start a standard and that's really where we are," Garrison told internetnews.com. [...] The process then to becoming a full standard is a long and drawn out one that could take five or more years. Garrison explained that the first part of the standard will look at technical and economic feasibility, as well as LAN and WAN opportunities.'"
Sweeeeet! Just in time for me to kick ass and chew bubblegum in super high speed on Duke Nukem Forever...
To be sure I'm first in line, I'll take my flying car and digital Paper directions. I'm sooo gonna get laid.
Don't anthropomorphize computers: they hate that.
Even PCI-X? I'm sure, these will improve too, in the future, of course...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
2010, it'll be just in time to be too slow.
to mention that it was 10000 times faster than Ethernet
Having a 100Gb home network will begin a Second Odyssey of user frustration: the broadband connection out of the wall will still only be 10Mb.
I'll take a 10GBASE-CX4 starter kit for my home network...
One 4 or 6 port Internet router, 2 PCI-X or PCI-E cards and 2 CX4 cables.
It's worth 700 euros... max.
Fuck, just typing this is making me bitter.
Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
How about we get 1gigabit to become standard first... i have yet to connect anywhere (home, office, school) with a gigabit connection...
This won't help anyone, what with the plans to throttle services.
All the talk about multi-tiered service and restricting/blocking content is heating up. Who will benefit from this? Only the few that can afford to shell out for premium services. Us little people will all end up with dial up grade service despite the fact that we COULD have better, provided we are willing to mortgage our homes and sell our souls for better speeds.
I hope the people drag the scumbag parasite profiteers out of their ivory towers and burn them at the stake.
Will we ever realize the full benefit of high speed Internet? Doubtful. It will be priced out of range of mortals..
Those terms imply consumer acceptance. Even the fastest consumer hard drives can't saturate a 1 gigabit ethernet connection. Consumers don't even need 10 gigabit, why would they want 100 gigabit?
Besides, while 1 gigabit ethernet has gained consumer acceptance over the years, with more and more consumer-level products supporting it, the vast majority of consumer networks are still 100 megabit. Most new computers might have onboard gigabit ethernet, but since manufacturers keep putting 100 megabit switches in convergence products (routers with onboard switches), nobody can use gigabit.
Of course, I realize that the article uses these terms in relation to large companies, but I don't think they can be used in that context. Even so, the current equipment to handle 10 gigabit connections is quite expensive even for large corporations, the cost of 100 gigabit would be prohibitive.
So why are we even talking about it now? This isn't going to change anybody's life (unless you've trying to get on the standards committee) today, tomorrow, or likely this year. How about this be reopened when some working silicon (or whatever material it's going to take to operate at this speed) is up and working in the lab? Then it might have some relevance.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
There isn't really much point, very few internet connections are going to be over 10mbit/s let alone 1000gbit/s. The only application this is really going to have is transferring huge files, and even then, hard disks arn't fast enough to saturate the network bandwidth.
"Oh boy"
...adding a fiber adapter to motherboards as standard? With the limitations that wire has, is a fiber connection directly on your motherboard, or as a cheap alternative add-on card, that far off?
Verizon already offers Fiber To The Home in some markets. Imagine a direct fiber connection to your PC.
"If you can't dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit."
have you even looked at the signal integrity issues related to any hss link running at 10gbps/link? unless you run 10 lvds hss for half-duplex 100gbps it'll have to be optical. then it becomes an issue of designing an optical switch that can handle the load, and a ridiculously (and impossibly so by today's standard) fast optical-to-electrical interface, again, to at least 10 hss lvds pairs to achieve those speeds... dream on!
In a way, you may be connecting through 1GB and just not know it. At the networks here, we have a 1GB connection from the server to the switch, when then splits into 10/100 connections. This means that multiple network machines can grab data in the 10/100 range, but the overall data consumption from machines connected to the server will not be bottlenecked at 100MB/s.
Of course, depending on what is being done the data rate is still limited by the hardware on the server (drive speeds, etc), but it does have some noticable speedup over plan 10/100 on all switch ports.
I realise your comment has been moderated "insightful" but could you explain it for us slow people.
What does 100G ethernet have to do with internal bus width?
Thank you.
(Obviously you have to have enough bus & memory bandwidth and compute power to drive a 100 Gb/s link - but this is a necessary piece of the puzzle).
You can only twist and shield the wires so much before you can't twist them anymore and extra shielding does jack. They've got to be hitting the limits of twisted pair copper wiring. It's gonna be a bitch to get it up to 100Gb, and it's going to be even harder (if it's even possible) to get that up to a terabit.
Of what good is a 1Gb/s ethernet connection to a consumer if his hard drive can only read/write data at a peak rate of 400 or 500 Mb/s ? The speed of the LAN is irrelevant at that point.
This is just what I was going to post. Around here, it seems very few can relate to technology that doesn't make sense to a home PC.
Faster network speeds can only improve the computing state of the art, as tech from big hardware trickles down to stuff we can afford to buy ourselves after a time.
Look at the tomato! Isn't it sad? He can't dance! Poor tomato!
Just think how much more of the InterNet the NSA can tap with these!
I've got a 15mbit connection at home, and its rare I see a transfer get that high. Once in a while I'll get an average speed around 1.1mb/sec but to max out the connection I have to hit a very unused server that is very close to me.
Until the places you want to connect to can handle that sort of load, wired network is just fine. Considering my house is all gigabit without fiber, it'll be a LONG time before the connection out of my house outstrips the speed of the network inside.
I couldn't even peruse porn that quickly
The problem with fibre to the desktop is that it is so expensive to terminate and too fragile to put behind Joe-User's computer. When he starts moving his cables around and bends the fibre, the fibre cable will break internally and will need a replacement. These replacement fibre cables are not cheap, and are far more expensive than Cat6 cables.
The best method of incorporation is simply to have a fibre backbone to the horizontal cross-connect of the facility (Or the local Switch in a small environment), and then have copper running from the switch to the user's desktop.
In this scenario, when Joe-User bends his 'internet cable' in half, he only increases attenuation, and perhaps will need a new $2.00 2metre Cat6 patch cord to support the 10Gbps coming from his wall jack.
This solution is far cheaper and accomodates for the common problems with workstation cables.
-Jesse
I was hoping there was a chance of 100 gigabits to the home, or at least the one gigabit the Japanese get to their homes. Who cares what hard disks can handle, if you're using streamed media, Grid Computing or just an old-fashioned RAM disk? (Besides, if you use multiple hard drives in a striped array, you can get far higher throughput than from a single drive.)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
just out of interest, will this 100gigabit networks run on Cat6 or Fibre??
could anyone please enlighten me, i couldnt find much info, thanks
I used to work in the InfiniBand space where folks are using host adapters at 20 Gbit (4X, Double Data Rate). Some of the big server vendors are doing 30 Gb (12X Single Data Rate) host adapters. With all of this host speed it is only a matter of time before the switch to switch links will go up in speed.
High speed systems like this are getting used in high performance computing to build larger clusters. Having faster switch links will allow these fabrics to be created with less switches and thus less hops from node to node and thus lower latency. Latency is probably the most important factor in the performance of a HPC cluster. It doesn't stop here...IB defines up to Quad Rate Rate 12X (120 Gbit). The HPC market is growing very well and the ethernet folks want a bigger piece of the high end of this market.
Systems with this high level of speed are also used in big telco setups. With broadband becoming increasing popular and bandwidth increasing, the telcos need to have higher end equipment in their core.
-- soldack
A more interesting question is whether to use singlemode or multimode fiber, if they go that route. Most "normal" lan hardware uses multimode, which in general is good for connections of tens of gigabits over distances of 2km or less. Singlemode fiber, on the other hand, can be used over much longer distances (100km between repeaters, multiple terabits are possible over a single pair using DWDM; SM fiber is commonly used by the telecommunication industry for long-range communication). Singlemode fiber is about equally expensive with multimode, but a little bit more difficult to terminate. The endpoint hardware, though, is more expensive for singlemode (they use lasers instead of leds, I believe) for equivalent speeds, so despite having ~100 times the capacity and ~50 times the range, singlemode is rarely used for links that don't need it.
What's the current speed that our hard drives are able to do, symmetrically? If we don't have the ability to access and transmit our data that fast at the time, what's the need?
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Just a random thought that popped up in my mind: The speed of light is 3*10^8 m/s, and you want to send a bitstream of 10^11 bit/s. If we forget that the actual speed of an electrical pulse is lower than the speed of light, this results in a mean travellenght of 0.003m, or 3 millimeter per bit. So in my utp-cable I will have a bit travelling through it every few millimeters. Isn't this going to cause severe trouble when e.g. one of the eight wires is a bit longer than the rest? Or how tight will you need to twist the cable then, to avoid self-induction? Even with fiberglass this might give trouble I think (e.g. a longer travellenght on the outside of a curve compared to the inside).
int main(void) {while(1) fork(); return 0;}
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