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Ethernet's 400-Gigabit Challenge Is a Good Problem To Have
alphadogg writes "As it embarks on what's likely to be a long journey to its next big increase in speed, Ethernet is in some ways a victim of its own success. Years ago, birthing a new generation of Ethernet was relatively straightforward: Enterprises wanted faster LANs, vendors figured out ways to achieve that throughput and hashed out a standard, and IT shops bought the speed boost with their next computers and switches. Now it's more complicated, with carriers, Web 2.0 giants, cloud providers, and enterprises all looking for different speeds and interfaces, some more urgently than others. ... That's what the IEEE 802.3 400Gbps Study Group faces as it tries to write the next chapter in Ethernet's history. ... 'You have a lot of different people coming in to the study group,' said John D'Ambrosia, the group's chair, in an interview at the Ethernet Alliance's Technology Exploration Forum in Santa Clara, California, on Tuesday. That can make it harder to reach consensus, with 75 percent approval required to ratify a standard, he said."
So whats the problem? Fitting more bandwidth onto a CAT5 cable? I feel like the summary needs more context.
400 GB per small* unit of time on the other hand ...
* "small unit of time" being 1 second or less
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
The problem isn't that you have a bunch of squabbling engineers who can't even figure out how to split a lunch check. It's that you have a bunch of executives and attorneys that want to get as much of their company's IP piled into the standard as possible.
The more I'm going to have to pay for the privilege.
Pretty much false. I remember in the 90s a T1 costing ~$700 for the ISP, and ~$700 for the telco fees, and only giving 1.5 Mbps. Nowadays it is common for households to have 10x that speed down stream and roughly the same speed for upstream, for ~1/20th the cost.
not a valid comparison, since a business grade symertric medium of course has a premium A T1 compariable line still is $300 month, and plenty of businesses have them for their mission critical traffic. Company I last worked at had 40 Mbit Comcast business line with routed subet, but they still had the T1 backup for email and main web site and replication to offsite DNS. That Comcast line went down or flapped sometimes, but the T1 was always there
My DSL line happily uploads 1.5Mbps for under $30 per month...
Write boring code, not shiny code!
Exactly. You just take the mainboard of a 1Gbit router, locate all the clock sources and replace them with 400 times as fast oscillator. Then you turn the power back on, crack open a beer, and enjoy your new intertubez with a wide grin.
Yeah but you get E10 (10Mbps up/down) for less than $800/month. That's 10 times the speed for the same price at T1s in the 90s. T1s are still expensive because of their large overhead and expensive equipment.
not a valid comparison, since a business grade symertric medium of course has a premium A T1 compariable line still is $300 month, and plenty of businesses have them for their mission critical traffic. Company I last worked at had 40 Mbit Comcast business line with routed subet, but they still had the T1 backup for email and main web site and replication to offsite DNS. That Comcast line went down or flapped sometimes, but the T1 was always there
Most businesses I've seen are moving to MPLS. We have a T3 we're trying to migrate away from as we can replace it with 2 50mbit mplss and make a 70% saving, and replace the kit with something that is actually supported.
One problem we're having is we have 2 E1 lines on the barer, but you can get E1 over IP converters which look promising.
Before you let anyone into your standards committee, make sure they don't work for Microsoft or a Microsoft affiliate. And if they do, make sure Microsoft isn't trying to push through a competing "standard".
Be sure you learn the ISO's lessons regarding Microsoft and its henchmen stuffing standards bodies.
Until the oversubscribed DSLAM starts dropping packets at 3PM. Jitter and latency will be worse as well. T1 is dedicated bandwidth to the router or switch.
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consumer grade, no service guarentees and not 100% reliable, that's the big difference.
I see other similar comments, it's like when people see the specs on the computer controlling a space rover and they say "but my desktop is so much faster!"
that's not normal, cable and DSL are very shaky compared to typical T1
Yes, you can get a cheap 10GbE switch. No, it doesn't have nearly the management that a Cisco or HP switch has.
If you are using one or two, you probably don't care. If you are using one or two thousand of them, you VERY much care.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
E10? in the UK for ITU-T they have E1 through E4.....we're talking about business grade time division multiplex carrier lines, not DSL or cable or other consumer grade shakier and less reliable tech
MPLS works over a number of carrier technologies including T1, E1, ATM, Frame Relay, and DSL.
Shhh, don't tell anyone, but a T1 is just two (or one, depending on span type) DSL circuits and has all the same impairments and limitations as the first two-wire residential DSL standard; which based itself off of two-wire T1 spans. The difference of course is repeaters for T1s are common place every 3000-5000ft. They exist for xDSL as well but are far more expensive and only ever seen in rural areas.
MPLS works over a number of carrier technologies including T1, E1, ATM, Frame Relay, and DSL.
They do (and other technologies. I wonder if you can do MPLS over MPLS. I have 3 days put aside next month for some fiddling with MPLS and VPLS), but as all I get is an ethernet handoff on a piece of fibre, it means that old inefficient technologies like T1/DS3/etc can be bypassed.
From my point of view, I pay $xxx per month, and get a cable in my equipment room, the fibre heads off to somewhere, the ethernet packets are tagged with MPLS and shifted quickly and reliably across multiple high bandwidth links (Say SEA ME WE 4) before landing in my equipment room 6,000 miles away unmolested. I'm not sure what 1tbit intercontinental fibre runs over, I'm sure its very complex and expensive, but that cost is shared amongst 10,000 other customers.
From my point of view as an end user though, I no longer need half a bay of ancient equipment to deliver a 45mbit bearer, I have a fibre landing on my £300 router at each end, I run an IP circuit on a /30 between the two routers, and I drop vlans off each side, and shape as much as I want. The capital cost drops 2 orders of magnitude, the reliability jumps up, the support costs collapse, and the flexibility increases.
Why would I, as a non network service provider, ever think of anything other than an ethernet or IP line?
Eh, our T1 goes out maybe once per year, and has a SLA.
Our cable network drops 2-3x per month and we have no better options. But it's about 30-35Mbps inbound and 3-5Mbps outbound, so far better bandwidth then the T1.
So we use both. The T1 is the fallback line for the cable internet and traffic automatically shifts from the cable line to the T1. It might take 2-3 minutes for the shift to happen, but its automatic and is better then a 30-240 minute downtime.
Wolde you bothe eate your cake, and have your cake?
E10? in the UK for ITU-T they have E1 through E4.....we're talking about business grade time division multiplex carrier lines, not DSL or cable or other consumer grade shakier and less reliable tech
I imagine 'E10' there is a reference to 10 Mbps metro Ethernet, something like the Ethernet in the First Mile approach. There's nothing inherently "consumer grade" about DSL itself: indeed, even E1 "leased lines" get delivered over HDSL or similar in some cases. Unlike cable, which is contended and prone to collisions, DSL gives you a constant bitrate (unless configured to vary to squeeze higher bitrates when line quality permits) point to point link, just like a conventional leased line - all the performance fluctuations of typical DSL Internet access come further into the network, where your 20 Mbps connection is sharing a 1 Gbps backhaul with a thousand others and gets choked up when everyone is streaming X-Brother Get Me Out Of Here or whatever. Give the DSL link dedicated or uncontended backhaul like leased lines have, you'll get the same performance too.