Slashdot Mirror
Where's Our Terabit Ethernet?
carusoj writes "Five years ago, we were talking about using Terabit Ethernet in 2008. Those plans have been pushed back a bit, but Ethernet inventor Bob Metcalfe this week is starting to throw around a new date for Terabit Ethernet: 2015. He's also suggesting that this be done in a non-standard way, at least at first, saying it's an opportunity to "break loose from the stranglehold of standards and move into some fun new technologies.""
640k is roughly:
10 Commodore 64s
20 BBC Micros
640 ZX-81s
6 times a SDSS floppy disc
Who needs that kind of memory?
We might not need terabit ethernet *now*, but in 25 years time, it may be the basic expectation of your LAN's speed.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
Yes, but waiting for competing standards to shake out can be a huge waste of time and money.
Doesn't anyone remember the bad old days before TCP/IP over Ethernet became standard?
How many organizations are still laboring to expunge the last remaining vestiges of Token Ring, IPX, Netware, etc.?
I humbly submit that the R&D money that could have increased the upper boundary of Ethernet speeds was spent to bring wireless to the masses. Five years ago, if you'd told me WiFi would now be a year away from nominal speeds of 250Mb/s I might have thought you were talking about prototypes. The dorms where I was a tech had just finished upgrading from 10Mb/s to 100Mb/s Ethernet. The few laptops that were sold with external wireless cards had nominal speeds of 10Mb/s. But now we have 802.11g and next year we should have 802.11n on the store shelves.
I think we've gained much more by pushing out the median speed of wireless than we could have gained from pushing out the marginal speed of twisted pair.
One might ask the same about birds. What ARE birds? We just don't know.
There is nothing you can do with a big-ass pipe except move bits.
Free clue: 10Gb ethernet is currently used mostly in clusters and as backbones for large network installations to move lots of data around very fast. It's a long way off being a LAN technology. In seven years time, Terabit ethernet will be used mostly in clusters and as backbones for large network installations and 10Gb ethernet will be a LAN technology.