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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."
400 GB per small* unit of time on the other hand ...
* "small unit of time" being 1 second or less
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As I understand it, the problem is more like how to fit 400 1Gbps cables into a single wrapper.
That, and too many conflicting commercial interests.
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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.
But we already have 10, 40 and 100gbps cables. Why 400x1?
Because interface bonding is like herding CATs.
Ezekiel 23:20
The problem is that different users have different requirements: Some will want low power requirements but don't need much range. Some will want more range but don't care much about power consumption and cost of advanced signal processing. Up to 1Gbps, Ethernet was a one-size-fits-all standard, mostly because everyone needed roughly the same: cheap, fast and uses existing cabling as much as possible (implying roughly the same range). Technological advances didn't require the kinds of tradeoff that are necessary now. From 10Gbps onward, Ethernet users have become more diverse and the technical challenges have forced more tradeoffs.
10, 40, and 100gbps?
Didn't you mean 10, 40, and 100 Mbps? Or I missed the joke?
At the 10gigE point, things diverge. There is single mode ("don't look at laser with remaining eye") media which is great for long distances, but more expensive, multi-mode which is good enough for inside the server room, and good ol' copper. However, this is what SFP modules are for.
It would be nice if fiber optic made it to the home, other than S/PDIF connections, and preferably with a more idiot-resistant connector than what existing fiber uses, especially with fouling lightpipes due to dust and such. Copper is useful, but eventually for faster connections, we will have to jump ship completely to fiber.
Of course, once we get 400Gbps, there will be the issues of how it filters down and all the switching/routing fabric needed. Most companies were dragged kicking and screaming to 1Gbps, and might use 10gigE for their trunk, or perhaps their SAN fabric. Trying to get them to 400Gbps for anything other than maybe storage will take a very long time.
Nobody is really even doing 10gigE over cat5 (incl 6,7,8) for more than tiny patch cables. Fiber is fairly cheap.
Your sort of right, but completely wrong. The majority of the 10G ports previously sold are SFP based, but with 10G optical SFPs running ~$80 the vast majority of those ports have direct attach copper cables (CU/CR/CX1/ whatever you want to call it).
Because of this, the growth direction seems to be towards 10Gbase-T which can do 100 meters over cat6A driving the per port costs down significantly over SFP based solutions. Frankly, with the 10G uptake as a server interconnect, 40G is a good "low cost" switch interconnect/long haul medium. Again killing the need for 10G SFP solutions.
What most homes have isn't copper. It's copperish, with traces of iron, tin, water, corrosion, bird droppings and dead rat. Those lines were not made for data. It's a wonder engineers have managed to cram bits down them as fast as they have with DSL.
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
Which unlucky places are those? Insert suitable carrier lost jokes...
Do you mean Al and not Au (Gold)?
Aluminium isn't a terrible cable - it's got about 60% the conductivity of copper. The problem is joining it. That oxide layer means that any type of twist or post connection is going to make terrible contact. You have to solder it, and it doesn't take solder at all well.
Fiber can be cheap, but usually not. We're not just talking about buying actual cables here, we need to be able to buy cable by the spool and terminate it ourselves. Fiber is a bitch to do that (you need gloves, special glue, a polishing pad, and a bunch of other things I can't think of at the moment, plus about 8 minutes of time per termination if you're fast at it, not to mention the possibility of getting glass stuck in your fingers) and doing it on a regular basis eats up your time, and time is money.
Twisted pair is easy though, I can do it literally in under 45 seconds per end with just two tools: scissors and a crimper.
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I am not seeing much uptake in 10GBASE-T in the data center (yet). People seem to be doing SFP+ copper in a rack (or 10Gbps backplane copper in blade systems), and SFP+ fiber between racks.
You can count the contractors that do proper CAT6A wiring on one hand. You can barely get a contractor to do CAT5E correctly (without using wire nuts to keep 2 ends together), let alone CAT6/CAT6A/CAT7, heck I have a hard enough time buying decent quality copper CAT5. CAT6 cable comes in at ~$300/1000ft, CAT7 at ~$800/1000ft. Decent quality MM fiber comes in at ~$200/1000ft.
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