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Site Editor Jeff Caruso helps you make sense of the evolving world of LANs and routers.
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.
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Comments (11)
Desperate indeedBy schratboy on July 3, 2007, 11:30 amI agree totally. All this discussion about 10 G is just the foundation for fork-lifting the entire network. Is it better? Is it faster? Is it necessary? No! Most...
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I know why 40 vs 100GB straight from a member of the comittee!By Andy on June 22, 2007, 8:35 am Its a matter fo the scalability of the PCI bus. 40GB is an acheviable goal on the PC manufacturers side, but a limiting factor from the network infrastructure...
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Desperate vendorsBy Anonymous on June 21, 2007, 12:24 pmI'm sorry, but I consider discussion of anything beyond 10G as desperate network product manufacturers desperately trying to create demand. I'm part of a 6000+...
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LAN aggregationBy Jeff Caruso on June 19, 2007, 9:27 amIf they can work it out so that both standards are on track, one benefit might be that you wouldn't have to aggregate links. Many organizations will use LAN aggregation...
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Hidden agenda maybe?By Anonymous on June 14, 2007, 10:33 pmThey can easily have market domination is the 40G very soon, but with 100G, they will just be one of the players ... so they want it to be included so they can cash...
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