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Terabit Ethernet Is Dead, For Now
Nerval's Lobster writes "Sorry, everybody: terabit Ethernet looks like it will have to wait a while longer. The IEEE 802.3 Industry Connections Higher Speed Ethernet Consensus group met this week in Geneva, Switzerland, with attendees concluding—almost to a man—that 400 Gbits/s should be the next step in the evolution of Ethernet. A straw poll at its conclusion found that 61 of the 62 attendees that voted supported 400 Gbits/s as the basis for the near term 'call for interest,' or CFI. The bandwidth call to arms was sounded by a July report by the IEEE, which concluded that, if current trends continue, networks will need to support capacity requirements of 1 terabit per second in 2015 and 10 terabits per second by 2020. In 2015 there will be nearly 15 billion fixed and mobile-networked devices and machine-to-machine connections."
I'd love to see the IEEE report that attempts to guesstimate the needs of future Ethernet users.
We need terabit Ethernet NOW, not in a decade.
1 TB Ethernet has an infinite latency.
Powers of 10.
Over copper or fibre.
At copper distances of 100m.
Call it a standard, if you like. Each time you have to upgrade, look to the next power of ten at that specification.
Because although 40Gb/s exists, it's not popular and you won't find it in your average computer supplier, ever. Sure, it's expensive to jump like that, but every technology boost is expensive and I'd rather we skipped the proprietary-data-center-only junk and leave them to their own devices and specify real-world, millions-of-businesses standards at jumps big enough to a) make a difference, b) be expensive at first but mass-market after (rather than sharing the market with half-assed solutions), c) run on the same specs at the previous generation (if not the same cables exactly, at least I can replace 100m runs with 100m runs and not worry).
I had a bunch of BSD servers ready to go in anticipation of terabit Ethernet! All I keep hearing is, "it's dead, Jim."
I have hopes though. The Dodge Dart came back, after all!
You may discover that you can't have what you want. There are real physical limitations we have to deal with. One issue, with regards to copper Ethernet, that we are having is keeping something that remains compatible with older style wiring. Sticking with 8P8C and UTP is becoming a real issue for higher speeds. At some point we may have to have a break where new standards require a different kind of jack and connector.
Also in terms of "data center only" devices that isn't how things work. You care what data centers use because you connect to them. There can be big advantages in terms of cost, simplicity, and latency, to stick all on one spec. So 40gbps or 400gbps could well be useful. No, maybe you don't see that to your desktop, but that doesn't mean it doesn't get used in the switching infrastructure in your company.
Also each order of magnitude you go up with Ethernet makes the next matter less. It's going to be awhile before there's any real need for 10gbps to the desktop. 1gbps is just plenty fast enough for most things. You can use things over a 1gbps link like they were on your local system and not see much of a performance penalty (latency is a bigger issue than speed in most things at that point). I mean consider that the original SATA spec is only 1.5gbps.
As for 100gbps, it'll take some major increases in what we do before there is a need for that to the desktop, if ever. 10gbps is just an amazing amount of bandwidth to a single computer. It is enough to do multiple uncompressed 1080p60 video streams, almost enough to do a 4k uncompressed video stream.
Big bandwidth is more of a data center/ISP need than a desktop need. 1gbps to the desktop is fine and will continue to be fine for quite some time. However to deliver that, you are going to need more than 1gbps above your connection.
Hardly any 10 base T systems bother with the CDMA/CD system that original ethernet had , in fact its more like a serial protocol rather than a broadcast "in the ether" one now. WHy not just give it a new name?
We ads on TV for 200gbit internet here in Sweden, yet - most people dont have anything above 4mbit. Sweden is pretty much a long forest country, and only the few big cities we have can enjoy really fast internet.
I live in a small city here, 10K+ something citizens, and Im the "lucky" one to live nearby the city core itself, so I get around 12-14mbit on a good day, this is far more than my peers get, they are lucky to hit 2mbit, and live only 2-3km away from the city core.
But you know what? I do just fine on 12mbit. With that, I can even watch television in FULL HD without any jumping or skipping, even directly from the USA via proxies.
Please mod up. CSMA/CD is what originally defined Ethernet, and it is completely dead except perhaps for some very special applications.
(The fact that you don't have any intermediate electronics between sender and receiver on coax based Ehernet eliminates some point
of failures).
i need a litre of water tomorrow so ill get a hlaf litre container today LOL idiots the lot of them....all i see is them trying to limit progress ....Are they all catholic by chance?
The name came from the original idea of it being a wireless protocol so has never made sense in any device ever sold with that name.
That way we can pay for 400g equipment then be told we need to "upgrade" to 1t equipment. Got to keep planned obsolescence moving...
Verizon, Comcast and others will still prioritize traffic so that P2P will never be faster than 1Mbit/sec. because they just won't have the capacity to handle it.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
Depends how you look at it. Coax ethernet did to all intents and purposes use an RF signal and , though I'm not an electronics engineer, I can't see any reason why - interference aside - you couldn't simply have plugged it into an antenna and with some suitable RX/TX amps used it as wireless.
I manage several petabytes of storage on a large compute cluster, and we could use Terabit ethernet yesterday. Network fabric throughput is our limiting factor on pushing data out.
One senses that vendors went for the 400 Gb standard on the premise of "why sell one network upgrade when you can sell two at twice the price", and not from actually catering to customer's needs.
It's similar to the current 40 Gb/100 Gb standards. No one that I know actually wants 40 Gb. I can bond 4 x 10 Gb and get that already. But vendors want that double upgrade fee from those companies that have to have every ephemeral competitive advantage.
Shouldn't we pushing photons over glass by now. Fibre infrastructure has existed for decades now, isn't it time it was scaled down to individual computers and appliances?
eh, no. Not even close.
AIUI the "ether" in ethernet was an analogy coming from the fact that a shared coax cable has some aspects in common with a radio system.
However while coax ethernet shares some things in common with a radio system there are also big differences that mean running ethernet over radio would NOT be a simple matter of adding amplifiers and antennas.
1: Radio systems have FAR more loss than coax cable systems. In particular this means it is MUCH harder to detect collisions since when you are transmitting your own signal is FAR stronger than anyone elses signal. That is why radio systems have tended to use CSMA/CA rather than CSMA/CD.
2: As well as having more loss radio systems also have highly variable loss so your receiver has to be able to cope with a wide range of signal levels.
3: DC can't be passed over radio. IIRC coax ethernet does use DC for some signalling functions (I belive it uses it for collision detection)
4: It is very difficult to make an antenna that works well with consistent performance over a very wide bandwidth (relative to the center frequency). So it is pretty much essential to modulate radio transmissions onto a carrier with a frequency many times the symbol rate.
5: Multipath can be very strong in indoor radio applications and requires special modulation techniques to deal with
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
from laughing. Why? Because the cost for ISP's to upgrade their networks to that kind of speed wont happen. Why? Because companies bend over to their shareholders instead of keeping their networks up to date.
Hardly any 10 base T systems bother with the CDMA/CD system that original ethernet had
I don't think i've ever seen a 10BASE-T system that didn't use CSMA/CD. Switches were too expensive back then to justify a fully switched network so people used hubs and let the end nodes continue to do collision detection and retry. Also afaict the autonegotiation system needed to automatically disable CSMA/CD didn't come in until 100BASE-T was introduced (it's certainly defined in the 100 megabit section of the spec).
OTOH at higher speeds CSMA/CD is basically gone. While I know 100BASE-T hubs exist i've never actually owned or knowlingly used one. I'm not sure gigabit hubs existed on the market at all (despite being defined in the spec). At 10G and beyond hubs aren't even defined.
WHy not just give it a new name?
Because the change came in gradually. Changing the name now would just serve to confuse people.
Also while modern ethernet networks don't use CSMA/CD much if at all the equipment does generally still support it. You can still take an old peice of equipment with an AUI port, plug a 10BASE-T transceiver into it and plug it into your brand new gigabit switch. The switch will detect the speed, turn on CSMA/CD on the port and things will just work.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
It's time we stop calling it "10 base T". The speed got boosted from 10mbps to 100mbps back in 1995, so there's nothing "10" about it anymore, unless you're surrounded by very bad networking equipment.
So ... not dead then.
Does anyone remember hearing that Des O'Malley once claimed the Maastricht treaty had "been dealt, at least temporarily, a fatal blow."
for an addin card. Which is interesting since the actual chip is something like $90 from Intel.
The name came from the original idea of it being a wireless protocol so has never made sense in any device ever sold with that name.
WiFi is ethernet, with wireless extensions. MACs, frames, etc etc etc. Before everyone knew what 802.11 was, it was even referred to regularly as wireless ethernet.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
10gbps is not that fast in terms of computer speed. A single lane of PCIe 3.0 is nearly 10gbps (it is 1Gbytes/sec). Memory is generally in the range of 20Gbytes/sec and up. L1 cache is over 100Gbytes/sec.
I'm not trying to say routing 10gbps is easy or anything, just that you seem to think processors are slower than they are. They deal with pretty vast amounts of data.
Out here in the vaguely technical world, we call it 10baseT, 100baseT, 1000baseT or 1GbaseT, and 10GbaseT as appropriate. And this has been fairly standard nomenclature for as long as I've been working at jobs with computers and LANs, since late 1990s.
10megabit ethernet is still very much used today. Every switch better damn well support it and support it well.
And I'm not talking about legacy hardware.
Modern ethernet controllers can and do drop to 10 megabits while in a low power or standby mode(Uses a lot less power/circuitry/computational power to maintain a 10mbit link). This is so systems can send and receive "baseband" or system management data while suspended or powered off (Or things like wake on lan). Typically this is very low bandwidth, sometimes only a handful of frames/packets at time so 10megabits is more than enough.
A factor of 10 increase with copper worked pretty good in the old days, but it has worked poorly in the new millennium.
I remember 1 gigabit ethernet was on the market in the late 90s, for over $100 per NIC. By ~2003, it could be had for $20 per NIC. I thought that 10 gigabit ethernet would be expensive then, and have a nice steady decline in price. I looked into it in detail in 2007, and 10 gigabit ethernet copper was going to hit the market shortly. Today, in 2012! on Newegg, dual 10 gigabit ethernet NICs are selling for over $600.... I am very disappointed in the IEEE.
The IEEE should give up on very high speed, short range copper networking, and leave it to the Infiniband Trade Association. They should implement a low cost 2.5 gigabit ethernet standard, much like the one proposed by Broadcom back in 2006, to replace the current low cost 1 gigabit ethernet. On fiber, they should stick ~100 lasers together to send data down a single fiber, and use whatever bandwidth that ends up being. Yes, the equipment will be big, bulky, expensive and power consuming. Yes, lasers will get better. But, the star of the show here is the expensive, long lived, high quality fiber optic cable. Fiber is the future. It has been the future for a long time, and the fiber will still be in the ground long after today's equipment goes to the big server room in the sky. I would also like a cheap LED NIC in the range of hundreds of megabits. That should be possible since researchers are having success with using commercial LED lighting to transmit data at hundreds of megabits.
Japan's NTT just sent a petabit per second over fiber. How can mere mortals hope to cope, having a measly 400 Gbps? We should be talking tens of terabits, at least.
...will still be 1.5Mbps down & .7Mbps up. Thank you, private industry, for paying out big bonuses & dividends & letting USA languish behind 3rd world country broadband speeds. Oh well...
It's my Ethernet .. And I want it NOW!!!!!!
RF and signals are not the same thing. Any signal transmitted by radio must have a carrier frequency to carry the data. Without the carrier frequency you would just be blasitng out noise in multiple bands or frequencies. Plus you also need to understand the physics of radio and antenna design to realize that an antenna for a 10MHz signal needs to be pretty big. Plus you would be stomping all over the short wave band which will piss a lot of people off inclusing various government branches including the FCC. You need to contain your signal in a bandwidth, or channel.
Little example of FM radio: When you tune 100.0 on the FM radio dial you are tuning in a 100MHz carrier signal, not a 20-15kHz audio signal. The 100MHz signal is FM modulated by using the amplitude of the audio signal to control the frequency of the carrier wave. The louder the signal, the higher the carrier frequency. To demodulate the signal a few methods exist but the best and most popular is using a super hetrodyne receiver to mix the tuned carrier with a closely matched signal from an oscillator in lock step (using a phase locked loop) you then get what is called the beat frequency or intermittent frequenct (IF) which is sent to another mixer to decode the audio data out.
What i described above is just the jist of FM modulation, probably not accurate either as I am not an RF expert myself (just someone with an interest and has done some reading). So in summary, its not as easy as putting an antenna on the wire.
Heck, my company is still stuck with 100Mbits - I guess our IT is depends on Frys store shelves for rolling out high speed network.
Gigabit is still too expensive they said.
WHy not just give it a new name?
It uses the same connectors, it has roughly the same design limitations, it's backwards compatible, and the operating systems treat them as if they're just the same.
What benefit would a new name have except to sow confusion? One out of a thousand IT guys knows that CMDA/CD is, much less that it's used on 10 Megabit ethernet.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Yes, but the name was chosen before any of that was gone into in detail. It's a case of people on the computer hardware side deciding on an approach before talking to anyone involved in communications hardware. Once they did the problem of laying a lot of cables looked smaller than trying for a high performance wireless network with the technology available at the time, but by then the name had stuck.
I'll just point out that most 10Gb switches (datacenter switching) have totally dropped 10mb and 100mb support. Or, in the case where it is supported, you get some fun knock-on effects like buffering of all switch traffic (using the CPU / memory for switching activity) on the switch instead of using the hardware fabric for direct switching. This has repercussions for latency and switch performance.
I found this out the hard way by trying to plug a (cheap?) Cisco ASA (with 100Mb ports) into Arista and Cisco Nexus 5XXX switches... I ended up having to use a crappy 1Gb netgear switch to bridge the two devices (which was OK, I just used the switch connecting ILO to the ASA for that).
For cost reasons, there is absolutely no reason to only wire up for 10Mb anymore. It is no cheaper than using the silicon for 100Mb link speed even if your device is much slower than 100Mb. Hell, to that end Raspberry PI has a 1Gb Ethernet port on it.
- Toast
and how much porn they could download with a terabit ethernet connection? But seriously, fuck terabit ethernet, that's for pussies. I say we go with free space communications between nodes over high powered laser links. Sure, there are a few things to work out, such as how to avoid being sliced in half, burned or blinded whenever you have to go into the machine room, but think of the bandwidth! Besides, it would be really cool to be able to repurpose old NICs as death rays.
cheap labor conservatives - they want to keep you hungry enough to be thankful for minimum wage.
"It uses the same connectors, "
I take it you've never seen coax ethernet then. Those connectors have nothing in common with the phone style ones used now.
If the 'official mainstream' don't want to do it, how can we get it done anyway?
Consumers will demand it, but it will be far after they see a need for it, and even further after not having it slows the economic engines.
Right now, I would settle for a moderate speed connection where I live. Comcast and AT&T serve places 3 miles away both north and south, but not here. ... We need to do something to get the monopolies put 'in their place'. AT&T is worse now that before the decent decree.
... "When you pry the source from my cold dead hands."