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IEEE Launches 400G Ethernet Standards Process
alphadogg writes "The IEEE this week launched a study group to explore development of a 400Gbps Ethernet standard to support booming demand for network bandwidth. Networks will need to support 58% compound annual growth rates in bandwidth on average, the IEEE claims, driven by simultaneous increases in users, access methodologies, access rates and services such as video on demand and social media. Networks would need to support capacity requirements of 1 terabit per second in 2015 and 10 terabit per second by 2020 if current trends continue, the organization says."
Even SSD drives couldn't send data fast enough for this. Most of my customers still use 100baseT. Some have upgraded to gigabit. I see very little use for this outside of large data centers,
/. just recently had an article about the Internet's energy needs starting to outpace demand. This might accelerate that imbalance.
Also, are the ISPs willing to put the resources into building such a network? NPR recently had a story about the obstinance of major ISPs to improving speeds in the U.S. compared to countries in Asia.
Is it me or is the amount of information, when I look back through the history of the internet, that I get out of the 'net pretty much the same, just the traffic goes up?
Is all that bandwidth really just wasted on shiny?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I can't cite it, so it never happened, but the transfer of data, its more intensive examples, benefits corporations and governments and corporations and governments only. Human to human contact, such as voice calls, were promised to be ubiquitous and free because what worth corporations would derive from digital technology's rapid growth dwarfed what benefit an individual might. Instead, a text message is given charge by the character. An international call is distinguished from a local one. Maybe somone smarter than me can apply the addage about moving tapes in a station wagon to this latest mind blowing transfer rate and suss a conundrum of data capacity: Its storage versus its distribution. Whole library of congresses shall be traded between great power in the blink of an eye while the rest of us are to have thin clients driven by ad revenue.
Would were! Should is! Could be! And live a hundred times three.
Just looking at the current rate of growth and extending it out indefinitely is clearly absurd. Exponential growth has to run into physical, or financial, limits sooner or later. Sooner in this case, I think.
Anyway, where I am, there has been no increase in speed for the last 10 years. In fact it's gotten worse, as more and more people hook up and try to stream video on their phones, pads, etc., etc., but the upstream capacity is still the same and the phone company just shrugs knowing we have no choice. So if I applied the same naive style of prediction, I'd say we are going to have 1.8 MB/sec forever. (Which may be true, unless fibre is activated in my lifetime.)
As of my post there were 8 posts, all pessimistic either stemming from "they will never be able to do it" or "customers wont want to upgrade" or "most of my customers are still 100mb, and thats all anyone will ever need"
Who are you people? This is a cool and exciting new technology. Since when did this become a website full of luddites? (and seriously, the "100mb/640k is enough for everybody" people can go fuck yourselves)
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
FTFA:
The article also notes that 100G, which was ratified in 2010, is just now barely coming online.
Thus doing a little math, we're likely to see this standard in 2020 at the earliest, later if the nation collapses in insolvency.
My ISP, AT&T - and the only one I can get without having to pay for Comcast - has had me at ~ 2300Kbps for the last 10 years. This is the fastest they offer in my area and from what I can tell, there's no plan to increase bandwidth.
This standard won't be doing me any good for a long time.
Why just 400Gbps if they figure they need 1Tbps by the year after next?
And I am glad to see that some of the readers have picked up on that.
Not needed for desktop- as many have said, most have 100mb at home and wouldn't see a difference between that and GigE.
But infrastructure that was blazing fast 10 years ago with 100 users is now crawling at a snail's pace with 5000 users.
Usage per device has gone up quite a bit, which has an impact.
The increase in the number of connected devices has had an impact.
Add the two together....
Yeah, current network infrastructure is not sufficient for future needs and if this shit isn't worked on NOW we can all expect our broadband connections to perform like the dialup in the 90s a few years from now.
Marketing buffoons: "Woohoo! More blinly-twirly CGI widgets and streamed kewt kitteh ads!"
Web Developers: "That will be $$$, please."
Data Center Professionals: "It's about time!"
Consumers on throttled DSL or cable connections: "Meh..."
Scruting the inscrutable for over 50 years.
Moving uncompressed HD video (4:2:2 10-bit) requires about 1.5 Gbps, so I am very happy to see the ability to carry 266 professional video streams in one 400 GbE connection in the broadcast plant.
UHDTV1 (sometimes incorrectly called 4K) resolution at 60 fps requires 12 Gbps for 4:2:2 10-bit uncompressed, so it already jumps into 40 GbE connections. I have to admit I am not sure if we will see uncompressed 4K very often even in production, but potentially a visually lossless codec around 1 Gbps would make a lot of sense if it holds up through multiple encode/decode cycles.
For bandwidth like this the only implimentations I am aware of are for long haul backbone on Telco networks. The Infinera DTN-X is being used and deployed currently, and the one that we just set up was 16 channel DWDM at 100GigE per channel. There's nothing like this that will be feeding a customer site for quite some time. Though we could drop 100GigE to the customer I suppose...
http://www.infinera.com/products/DTN-X.html
It does not look like Infinera has updated their specs on this recently.
Copper 10 gigabit ethernet was on the market in 2008. It is still expensive. It is not following the cost drop of 1 gigabit ethernet in the late 90s, early 2000s. Ethernet has reached the end of the assumption of rapidly advancing bandwidth, and rapid improvements in transistor density. It is now time for a high bandwidth optimized network technology. (Infiniband?)
Fax machines are still used in some fields because their acceptance as legally-binding copies of signed contracts has already been tested in the courts and case law / precedents already established. This has not yet occurred for "electronic signatures", so the legal validity of electronically signed contracts is not as well established in courts of law, at least in the USA.
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There are also privacy issues, and the risk and susceptibility of interception when transmitting unencrypted sensitive information over the internet (like those pictures of checks). Wikipedia's article on "Fax" has this: Fax machines still retain some advantages, particularly in the transmission of sensitive material which, if sent over the Internet unencrypted, may be vulnerable to interception, without the need for telephone tapping. In some countries, because electronic signatures on contracts are not recognized by law while faxed contracts with copies of signatures are, fax machines enjoy continuing support in business.[2] In Japan, faxes are still used extensively for cultural reasons