The next Ethernet speed will be 100Gbps, the IEEE voted recently. Now the standards body just has to go build something never done before.

The IEEE's Higher Speed Study Group (HSSG), tasked with exploring what Ethernet's next speed might be, voted to pursue 100G Ethernet over other considerations, such as 40Gbps Ethernet. The IEEE will work to standardize 100G Ethernet over distances as far as 6 miles over single-mode fiber optic cabling and 328 feet over multimode fiber.

With the approval to move to 100G Ethernet, the next step is to form a 100G Ethernet Task Force to study how to achieve a standard that is technically feasible and economically viable, says John D'Ambrosia, chair of the IEEE HSSG, and scientist of components technology at Force10 Networks.

"There is still a lot of work to be done to finalize our objectives, and where this thing will go," D'Ambrosia says, adding that a formal task force could be approved by July 2007. A completed 100G Ethernet standard might appear by 2009 or 2010. "The next step is getting the project into the 802 process," he adds, referring to the IEEE's umbrella of Working Groups for networking standards, which govern everything from wired Ethernet and Token Ring to wireless LANs and WiMAX.

Click to see: 100G Ethernet timeline

The need for 100G Ethernet is growing as IP video and transaction-intensive Web 2.0 applications are exploding across the Internet. Companies such as YouTube regularly add 10Gbps service pipes to meet growing demand, and carriers will need a better way to aggregate such links, industry watchers say.

The challenge for 100G will be to push Ethernet to a speed that does not currently exist under any standard. Examples of past leaps in Ethernet speeds, which followed the lead of other technologies, include: Fast Ethernet, which followed the 100Mbps FDDI standard; and 10G Ethernet, which used the 9.9Gbps OC-192 SONET as its base. In each case, the resulting Ethernet standard borrowed components and encoding techniques used in the existing non-Ethernet standards.

While a comparable 100Gbps standard does not exist now for Ethernet to emulate, D'Ambrosia anticipates this will not be too great a challenge for work on 100G. A 100G standard will probably use parallel data transmission — multiple 10Gbps-plus signals traveling over multiple fibers or lanes, D'Ambrosia says. "There has been a lot of maturing in 10G technology" around bonding together multiple links, D'Ambrosia says. "Everyone [in the HSSG] has a high comfort level that we can leverage existing technology" to achieve a 100G standard.