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Terabit Ethernet Is Dead, For Now

Posted by samzenpus on from the slow-lane dept.

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."

4 of 140 comments (clear)

  1. Damn the summary by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    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. Re:Damn the summary by somersault · · Score: 4, Interesting

      And what exactly is he doing over ethernet that needs that much speed? I'm only just now looking at upgrading our small business network to gigabit. A couple of years ago the cost of a 48 port gigabit switch was pretty high, but now it's very reasonable

      --
      which is totally what she said
  2. Why sell one, when you can sell two? by MetricT · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:Why sell one, when you can sell two? by mla_anderson · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Yep it's definitely not a technical problem, after all getting serial data to run at 312.5 Gbps over long distances of un-shielded twisted pair copper is simple. The edges of the data are only in the 1.2 THz range after all.

      Even on a PCB, 312.5 Gbps gets tricky and expensive, over long distances of fiber or copper it will be very difficult. Dropping to 400 Gbps brings it into the realm of slightly possible but still ridiculously expensive, plus at 400 Gbps you can bond just three links and get 1.2Tbps through, well probably less after overhead.

      Damn CS/CE's think they know RF!

      --
      Sig is on vacation