Ethernet's evangelist

From the 100G infrastructure to consumer electronics, Brad Booth sees Ethernet, well, just about everywhere

As a child growing up in western Canada, Brad Booth always liked to tinker with things.

When not skiing or playing hockey, the president of the Ethernet Alliance and senior principal engineer for Applied Micro Circuits Corp. was interested in electronics and the coming of the computer age.

"That kind of got us all really turned on to it," he says of himself and many of his childhood peers. "Fortunately, the schools were able to alter some of their curriculum to accommodate us."

To continue reading, register here to become an Insider. You'll get free access to premium content from CIO, Computerworld, CSO, InfoWorld, and Network World. See more Insider content or sign in.

As a child growing up in western Canada, Brad Booth always liked to tinker with things.

When not skiing or playing hockey, the president of the Ethernet Alliance and senior principal engineer for Applied Micro Circuits Corp. was interested in electronics and the coming of the computer age.

"That kind of got us all really turned on to it," he says of himself and many of his childhood peers. "Fortunately, the schools were able to alter some of their curriculum to accommodate us."

Interest in electronics and mathematics stayed with him all through school and then into college. While at the University of Victoria, in British Columbia, Booth took courses specifically around designing VLSI circuits, graduating in 1989 with a bachelor's degree in engineering.

After college, Booth went into telephony, working on ATM and SONET projects at Bell Northern Research. He got into Ethernet because of a stark, but prescient, comment by a superior at one of his later employers. "My coming into Ethernet was circumstance more than anything," he says. "The president of one of the companies I was working for at the time basically said that it owned 90% of the ATM market, but it was never going to be worth as much as 10% of the Ethernet market. To me, that seemed like a very interesting statement."

So Booth heeded his employer's advice and ended up at a company in Austin, Texas, that was looking for Ethernet chip designers. He was then assigned to attend a standards meeting and the rest, they say....

"It seemed to really fit with what I liked to do," Booth says of attending the Ethernet standards meeting and debating the merits of one proposal or implementation vs. the next. He's been attending and conducting standards meetings ever since, in addition to writing some of the most recent Ethernet standards documents.

He chaired IEEE standard 802.3an-2006, and before that he was the editor-in-chief for IEEE standard 802.3ae-2002. In 2003, Booth received recognition as a senior member of the IEEE.