A sharp drop in 10G Ethernet pricing, and the emergence of technology that runs 10G over copper, could spur enterprise interest in the technology, users and analysts say.

Pre-standard 10G prices were high enough to scare all but the most deep-pocketed organizations, as debut products three years ago hovered around $100,000 per port. Today, pricing has fallen below $7,000 per link - under the $1,000-per-Gigabit threshold that analysts have said would be necessary to attract buyers. And with one copper 10G standard in the books, and another on its way, experts are predicting an imminent rise in 10G adoption.

"I believe the current reduction in 10 Gigabit pricing is being driven by the availability of Gigabit-over-copper on the edge, and the move to more centralized application services," says Len Stans, director of network technology at Sandia National Laboratories, a U.S. Department of Energy lab with a large supercomputing research facility in Albuquerque, N.M.

Sandia has about 20 10G ports on a mix of Cisco, Extreme Networks, Force10 Networks and Foundry Networks switches. These boxes tie together backbone switches and connect to switches that aggregate clusters of smaller machines, linked via Gigabit Ethernet. Stans expects to boost the lab's 10G port count to 300 by this time next year.

The per-port price for 10G has dropped rapidly since the introduction of pre-standard 10G equipment in 2001. Foundry was the first to ship a pre-standard 10G port on its BigIron switch, at a cost of about $80,000 for the module and optics. Now Foundry, Cisco, Extreme and Force10 all have products priced between $4,000 and $7,000 for a fiber-based Gigabit Ethernet port.

"The pricing cuts [for 10G gear] are a surprise to me," says Zeus Kerravala, an analyst with The Yankee Group. "The average cost of a 10 Gigabit port has come down much more dramatically than I would have figured a few years ago." Vendors have said that wider availability of 10G optical components from more suppliers, and the emergence of standard 10G form factors such as the XAUI interface and XenPak modular transceivers, have helped drive down the cost of optics and components.

The approval of an IEEE standard for copper-based 10G early this month promises to hasten the price decreases. The IEEE standard, specified as 10GBase-CX4, uses InfiniBand IBX4 twinaxial cable, rather than the more common Category 5 and 6 cabling, which supports Ethernet speeds from 10M to 1000M bit/sec.

Last week, Cisco announced a$600 10G copper port module for its Catalyst 6500 switch. Cisco was the leader in 10G revenue last year, according to Gartner, with $45 million. Cisco was followed by Foundry with $25 million and Force10 with $6 million.

"A majority of the cost that goes into building a [10G] port still has to do with optics," says Steven Shalita, a marketing manager for Cisco's switch products.

Although low in price - Cisco's 10GBase-CX4 port costs one-sixth the price of the vendor's lowest-cost fiber-based port - not everyone thinks the current copper 10G standard is enough to drive new 10G applications.