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.""

Comments

Stranglehold?

[Brian Gordon]

I'd like to see the internet held together by his fun new technologies. See how well machines communicate without basic protocols.

Re:Stranglehold?

[KublaiKhan]

I see it as an opportunity for a new standard to evolve in a more natural fashion. Consider HD-DVD v. Blu-Ray--you have two competing formats come out, neither of which is compatible with the other's standard, but after a while it becomes apparent which one is going to be used.

Besides, it's not like this is going to affect TCP or IP or whatnot--this is way down at the bottom of the OSI model at level 1.

Re:Stranglehold?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.?

Re:Stranglehold?

[geekoid]

I think you don't understand where he is coming from.

You would need to use the existing protocols on some level, but the protaocols to hit terabyte might need to be different. So he is saying Think about how to get reach the goal firsts, then delve into the protocol arena. If it is superior then eventually we would discard the older protocols and only use the new one.

Re:Stranglehold?

[KublaiKhan]

Not entirely.

There are still a few token rings and other such mesozoic cruft wandering around in the wild out there, but they still work--because some clever folks invented a way to get from one kind of network to another.

Keep in mind, also, that it's really only the early adopters--those who are willing to buy 1st-generation equipment--who would get 'screwed over', and they have, by definition (as the first generation of a given kind of thing is always several times more expensive than the 'production' generations), the money to waste on this sort of thing.

Who needs it?

[mollymoo]

One terrabit per second is roughly:

6 x as fast as 32-bit 2.8GHz HyperTransport
16 x as fast as x16 PCIe 2.0
60 x as fast as 20GFC fibre channel
400 x as fast as SATA-300
700 uncompressed 1080p HDTV streams (24bpp, 30fps)
15 million telephone calls

Other than the LHC, who the hells needs that kind of bandwidth?

Re:Who needs it?

[Alioth]

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.

Re:Who needs it?

[TeknoHog]

One terrabit per second is roughly:

81 lunabits per second.

Re:Who needs it?

[jandrese]

Maybe. One of the things that I've noticed is that as the bandwidth increases it becomes harder and harder to fill it up. Back in the Commodore 64 days it was not hard at all to run your machine out of memory by just typing a paper that was too long, and that's without graphics/charts/etc... These days there is no way a person would be able to type enough text to even make a noticeable dent in the main memory of any commodity machine. When everybody used 56k modems and serial lines it was trivially easy to fill up the link. However, when they moved to 10Mb Ethernet it got harder, but not impossible. Suddenly compressed music files were not a problem, although compressed video (DivX) still was. Then we went to 100Mb Ethernet and compressed video is no longer much of a bottleneck. Even now most modern machines come with Gigabit Ethernet ports that your average person can't fill with anything. Without new and bandwith intensive applications people won't be inclined to improve their bandwidth.

That's not to say someone won't come up with some application that requires a ton of bandwidth (distributed neural nets?), but none of our current applications would even really scale up to requiring 10GbE. The only realistic thing that comes to mind is some sort of Super HD video format, but anything like that is at least a decade away.

Re:Who needs it?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

For those of you playing at home, a TB is

[Anonymous Coward]

For those of you playing at home, a TB is a lot more than you can ever use in a million years...unless you link off the pirate bay, then it's not quite enough.

Re:Wednesday?

[sm62704]

Um, they just made an announcement that they reached 16Tbits/sec on Wednesday, sheesh. Use the bandwidth you have for something useful.

Like porn?

I'd sooner have...

[Channard]

.. a technology that lets homes receive fast internet no matter where they are. My area's not cabled up, and thanks to me being too far from the exchange.. I just live in a normal street .. I can't reliably get more than 512KB a second. Fix that, and you'd be laughing. Powerline networking, maybe?

Misleading name, "Ethernet".

[pla]

"He's also suggesting that this be done in a non-standard way"

No, he suggested that five years ago

We don't yet have the technology described (wave division multiplexing) in our homes because very, very few of us want to bother with fiber in our homes at all.

You can push an amazing amount of data over glass, no one would claim otherwise. You can't, however, drape it across the floor and up the stairs to your switch for a quick LAN connection... Not only does terminating a fiber suck, the first time the dog steps on that little yellow wire, end of connection. By contrast, I've used Cat5 as a structural material (tied a PC to a hook on the ceiling with it) WHILE USING IT for data.

So no, we won't see terabit ethernet anytime soon, unless someone figures out a way to push it over copper.

Re:2015

[milsoRgen]

Yes, and I suppose we'll have flying cars by then too? And Windows will be smaller, faster and more stable!

Re:but but but

[plague3106]

The slashdot summary just about nailed it.

So, are we at the start of the end times now?

Wait... you believe Metcalfe WHY?

[1336]

As in the Robert Metcalfe whose Wikipedia article has an "Incorrect predictions" section listing where he wrongly thought that "the internet would suffer a catastrophic collapse" in 1996 and this gem:

Metcalfe is also known for his harsh criticism of open source software, and Linux in particular, predicting that the latter would be obliterated after Microsoft released Windows 2000:

The Open Source Movement's ideology is utopian balderdash [... that] reminds me of communism. [...] Linux [is like] organic software grown in utopia by spiritualists [...] When they bring organic fruit to market, you pay extra for small apples with open sores - the Open Sores Movement. When [Windows 2000] gets here, goodbye Linux.

Just because he did something really cool 35 years ago doesn't make him an expert on related matters now.

It's about Shannon's law too.

[Z00L00K]

For everyone that has been working with communication since the early datacom ages Shannon's law has been important. It's still important, and it means that you can't just push everything through, you have to consider the media used.

In a way it can be tweaked a bit, and that has caused a confusion among those that aren't well into the technological difference between Baud (modulation changes per second) and BPS (bits per second).

Anyway - The classical phone modems can have a speed up to 56kbps, but effectively they stay at 28 to 33kbps. And that on a line that actually only provides 3kHz bandwidth. The trick is that in the 3KHz bandwidth you can have a carrier with less than 3000 modulation changes per second, often 2400. In each modulation change you not only have one bit transferred, but multiple bits. This is achieved by having a variation in both phase and amplitude of the signal.

So to utilize the cabling at the extreme speeds that a terabit Ethernet is you may have to resort to the same technique.

There have also been other techniques in use like using multiple carrier frequencies, like what the Telebit Trailblazer modems did. That technology was very resilient to interference compared to the CCITT standards, but it had other disadvantages instead.

Progress!

[DragonWriter]

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.

So, 5 years ago, Tb-E was 5 years away, and now its 7 years away. So by 2015, it should be about 10 years away, and by 2025 it should be about 14 years away, etc.

Put off in favor of wireless.

[scaryjohn]

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.