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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.
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."
...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!
(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 might be right in that a single consumer drive can not make use of that storage, but there are systems out there that can saturate a 10gbs link many times over.
Just because you can not fathom a use for the technology, does not make it pointless. Just try managing an environment with 50+ backup servers (because of the 1gbs and 100mbit links to those servers) compared to an environment that has 5 backup servers connected via redundant 10gbs links to the core switches in a datacenter.
Not only do we get *more* done with 1/10 the number of servers, we have reduced the management and administrative workload and made administrators time available to work on important things like disaster recovery.
As long as storage and disks keep growing, we _have_ to keep increasing the speeds of the links between them. If we don't, the amount of time it takes to access and back up those disks will increase exponentially along with thier capacity.
If your PCI bus can only serve data to your NIC at 50Gbps, your card that can send at 100Gbps won't have anything to send that fast because he's waiting for the computer to feed him.
Now of course that goes away if you only use 100Gbps as trunks between switches, and connections to individual PCs stays at GigE, but the internal bus of the switch still comes into play.
They gave up on UTP cabling for the 10gbe standard. 100gbe will be fibre.
We could also figure out how to do DWDM or other technologies that are easy with radio to put data on the wire in a more effecient manner. Going to fiber works, of course, but then you still have the problem with switches and GBICs and the like: the signal has to be in copper at some point, and 100Gb pushes the limits on that until we start using better encoding.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Most likely 100Gbit will run on Fiber Cables, which have MUCH more bandwidth than their copper-based equivelents (Cat6,etc.)Wikipedia says that they have the potential to carry terabits of data per second.
For the ethernet cables, according to wikipedia, Cat6 is reliable up to 1Gbit connections. However, Category 7 cables have been developed for 10Gbit connections. It seems to me that it might be possible to push ethernet cables up to 100Gbit. But that is a BIG if, as I don't know how much further the standard RJ-45 cables can be pushed beyond Cat7.