Group pushes 100 Gigabit Ethernet

You may have seen news of the recent disagreements within the IEEE's Higher Speed Study Group; now an alliance has organized a push for 100 Gigabit Ethernet.

Network World's Jim Duffy summed up the controversy in a recent story. As he notes, it seemed like the group had settled on 100Gbps as the speed to shoot for, beating out 40Gbps, which was also proposed.

But more recently, there has been some disagreement over whether 40G should be pursued after all, and if so, whether it should be done within the same group in the IEEE. The disagreement has stalled the study group, and it hopes to reach a decision and move forward next month.

Against this backdrop, this week at the NXTcomm 2007 trade show a group calling itself the "Road to 100G" Alliance appeared, with a Web site. The group explains its goals this way:

"The charter of the Road to 100G Alliance is to provide a framework that encourages the development of comprehensive solutions that are optimized for high-density communications applications. The Alliance plans to provide ongoing education, application support and common reference design data to accelerate the deployment of high performance enterprise, metro, carrier, and long haul network solutions. The Road to 100G Alliance also plans to sponsor programs, events and communications relating to the validation of these advanced networking platforms."

Founding members are Bay Microsystems, Enigma Semiconductor, IDTTM, IP Infusion, and Lattice Semiconductor.

The Ethernet Alliance - the industry alliance with a large membership that pushes for Ethernet adoption in just about every networking capacity - has remained silent on the issue, ever since issuing a press release in December that the IEEE group had decided on 100Gbps.

Jeff Caruso is site editor at Network World.