IEEE Sets Sights on 100G Ethernet

coondoggie writes to mention a Network World article about the IEEE's new 100G Ethernet initiative. The organizing body's High Speed Study Group has voted to try for the 100G standard over other ideas, like 40Gbps ethernet. From the article: "The IEEE will work to standardize 100G Ethernet over distances as far as 6 miles over single-mode fiber optic cabling and 328 feet over multimode fiber. With the approval to move to 100G Ethernet, the next step is to form a 100G Ethernet Task Force to study how to achieve a standard that is technically feasible and economically viable, says John D'Ambrosia, chair of the IEEE HSSG, and scientist of components technology at Force10 Networks." With video download services and interactive media becoming ever more the focus of internet startups, the organization is eager to offer a way to aggregate pipes in the coming years. The current thinking is that achieving these speeds will be reached by advancing bonding techniques for 10G signals over multiple fibers.

Comments

What's in it for desktop users?

[morgan_greywolf]

As it is, your average desktop will not handle anything even close to 100G Ethernet. At that point, your bottleneck is the PCI or PCI-X bus. As the bus has been one of the slowest PC components to innovate, I see these new, ultra-high speed Ethernet standards as only benefiting backbone providers, etc., for many years to come.

Re:What's in it for desktop users?

[corsec67]

What, you think that any ISP would actually allow downloads fast enough to use over 100baseT?

Really, even full 10baseT (as an obtainable download speed, not just the home->CO link speed) would be an improvement to many people.

Re:What's in it for desktop users?

[UnknowingFool]

Well that swimsuit supermodel in the magazine I've been lusting after will never date me, but I can dream about it can't I? At least 100G Ethernet to the desktop might be realized in my lifetime. A supermodel, not so much. :P

Re:What's in it for desktop users?

[FireFury03]

What, you think that any ISP would actually allow downloads fast enough to use over 100baseT?

Believe it or not, some people use LANs for things other than accessing the internet... The internet connection speed becomes unimportant if the network is actually a SAN.

Really, even full 10baseT (as an obtainable download speed, not just the home->CO link speed) would be an improvement to many people.

We're reaching the point now where I've stopped caring so much about download speed (I have an 8Mbps DSL) - upload speed is becoming a serious headache since on most ADSL lines (at least in the UK) it tops out at ~340Kbps. At that upload speed you're talking about ~45ms per MTU sized (1500 byte) packet - that's quite a lot of latency jitter and can cause serious problems for realtime applications such as VoIP, which often have jitter buffers of only around 100ms long.

Re:What's in it for desktop users?

[Znork]

Heck, with 100Gb ethernet, who says you have to _have_ PCIe; once you reach those speeds it would be entirely viable to move most PC components to their own ethernet bus/network. Imagine having your NVidia graphics units connected to your LAN and usable from any of your PC's; plugging another unit into the network makes it instantly accessible by all devices as tho it was more or less local hardware. Etc.

SAN is storage moving that way, we might very well expect other components to move in the same direction.

Of course, expect a horde of crap patent applications for shit like 'graphics acceleration _over a network_' just because the technology becomes feasible. Which may drive prices through the roof and/or hold development back a decade or five.

Re:What's in it for desktop users?

[NeuralSpike]

Dude, I think with the various packet headers etc., 100Gbit isn't all that much faster than a 16x PCI express slot. And then there is latency...

I prefer Bill Watkins' take on it.

[Tackhead]

"The need for 100G Ethernet is growing as IP video and transaction-intensive Web 2.0 applications are exploding across the Internet. Companies such as YouTube regularly add 10Gbps service pipes to meet growing demand, and carriers will need a better way to aggregate such links, industry watchers say."

- From TFA.

Which is all well and good, but for honesty, I prefer Bill Watkins' take on it.

"Let's face it, we're not changing the world. We're building a product that helps people buy more crap - and watch porn."

Bill watkins, CEO of Seagate

don't trust such initiatives

[SilentGhost]

328 feet - it's a good standard, but I like 100 metres better.

Re:don't trust such initiatives

[tool462]

Pause for a moment and realize that 6 miles is approximately 10km, which is probably the "real" spec. Not only is it metric, but it's a power of 10, which gives me lots of warm fuzzies.

Uplink

[GigsVT]

What I really want to see is higher uplink ports on SMB hardware.

Right now, if I want to make a medium size network using lower cost components, it might look something like 5- 24 port, 100-meg switches with 1 GB uplink to a big GB switch.

The bottleneck here is those uplinks. Each 100meg switch has plenty of backplane, and so does the gigabit switch, but those 100 meg 24 port switches have to share 1GB each to the backbone MDF.

So I really don't care about PCs or network cards or whatever, just give me 10GB links that I can use between switches without having to pay for overpriced Cisco crap.

Re:I'm going to guess...

[jeffmeden]

Hi I'm Progress, and I'm going to guess that we haven't met. I will be forever pushing forward with faster speeds. Thought you were happy with Gigabit over copper? LUDDITE! 10Gbit is enough for all your communication needs since you can xfer the library of congress 5 times a minute? THINK AGAIN! 100G Ethernet is the natural progression and before long you WILL want it. Trust me, I have been working this way for thousands of years. Glad we could get acquainted, now excuse me I need to get back to hiding from politicians.

*sigh*

[M0b1u5]

Strange. The standard is to be "six miles" over single mode, and "328 feet" over multimode.

I don't get it!

I mean, we KNOW all decent standards use metric measurements - and Americans are inclined to convert them to the National Stupid System, so 328 feet makes sense (100 metres) - but where does this "6 miles" business come from? It is only 9,660 metres (9.66 km).

Surely the standard will be 10,000 metres - ten kilometres, and the poster was lazy, and couldn't be bothered with the extra 0.2 of a mile?

My question is this: when the specification is clearly based on very simple numbers: 100 metres and 10,000 metres - why convert that into the Stupid System? /.ers are not so stupid as to have to be fed figures fudged for obscurity!