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.'"

Comments

Grass root? Mainstream?

[Guspaz]

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.

You all are missing the point

[0rbit4l]

100 Gb/s Ethernet is not for joe schmoe sitting at home on his consumer broadband connection - it's for servers connected to a backbone link. The idea is that 100 Gb/s Ethernet would be part of a server that could handle far more connections & deliver far more throughput per machine, which is important in the datacenter where you'd like to reduce the raw number of machines to save on power (and as part of that, cooling). Sheesh, if you'd stop bitching for a few minutes about your cable company limiting the rate at which you copy donkey porn, you might discover a whole other world of networking challenges out there that people are working 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).