Copper gigabit fever builds

Gigabit Ethernet over copper gear to star at show.

By Jeff Caruso
Network World, 09/13/99

Support for Gigabit Ethernet over Category 5 copper wiring will swell this week as vendors showcase interoperability among early versions of their products at NetWorld+Interop '99 Atlanta.

New switching gear from 3Com, Cabletron and others will join recently unveiled products from FlowWise Networks, Foundry Networks and Hewlett-Packard at the Gigabit Ethernet Alliance's booth. Most of the equipment will start shipping by year-end.

3Com will add 1000Base-T support to a network interface card, a downlink module for its SuperStack switches and an upcoming model in the SuperStack line, according to a company spokesman. All these products will be available in the first half of next year.

Cabletron will demonstrate a one-port copper gigabit uplink for its SmartSwitch 6000 - due out at the end of the month - and a two-port module for the SmartSwitch Router, coming out early next year.

Intel says it will contribute a 1000Base-T adapter to the market. But the company insists it isn't announcing any copper gigabit products at the show and won't say when the adapter will ship.

The interoperability demonstration builds on the simple demos given at spring Interop. At that time, Alteon WebSystems, Extreme Networks and Alcatel-owned Packet Engines made separate efforts to show data transmitting at gigabit rates over copper. After many delays, Broadcom was able to deliver chips for the physical-layer interface so equipment vendors could put together prototypes. Now those chips are more widely available, but not in volumes large enough to ship products.

It is anticipated that Gigabit Ethernet-over-Cat 5 wires will primarily be used in server connections. The technology is expected to be less expensive and easier to install than Gigabit Ethernet over fiber optics.

"We'll definitely be looking at [copper gigabit] for server farms, but not for the backbone," says Phil Kwan, manager of network planning and operations for Incyte Pharmaceuticals in Palo Alto. The company has data-mining applications running on its servers that could use the bandwidth, Kwan says.

The availability of a copper version will give an added boost to an already growing market for Gigabit Ethernet, according to Infonetics Research in San Jose. A recent survey of 225 companies showed that 40% will implement Gigabit Ethernet in their backbones over the next 18 months and 19% will run the technology to servers.

One hurdle to deploying copper Gigabit Ethernet is that a lot of the existing wiring may not be good enough for Gigabit Ethernet, cautions Esmeralda Silva, research manager at International Data Corp. in Framingham, Mass.

Cat 5 wiring is popular, and that's part of the appeal of 1000Base-T. But the new standard pushes Cat 5 to its limit. If the wiring hasn't been installed up to specification, users may see some problems with the new technology.

"You don't even think about wiring, but it has to be true Cat-5 for Gigabit Ethernet to work," Silva says.

Some of the first products supporting the new technology were introduced last month. HP says it will ship a module for its ProCurve switches in October.

Foundry followed with three switches, also set to ship next month (NW, Aug. 23, page 22). The largest of the three holds up to 64 ports of copper Gigabit Ethernet.

FlowWise introduced a card for Cisco routers with a mix of copper gigabit, fiber gigabit and Fast Ethernet ports. Shipments are planned for November.

At this time a year ago, vendors were hoping to have products ready by the end of 1998. But they were set back by the complexity involved in squeezing a gigabit of data onto the Cat 5 cable. Part of the problem is that copper gigabit's physical-layer technology is untested in the real world, while fiber gigabit builds on technology developed for Fibre Channel.

It seems more likely that vendors will meet their objectives for shipments this year, given that the physical-layer chips are now available.