* IEEE forms Higher Speed Study Group
The IEEE 802.3 working group has gone ahead and established a Higher Speed Study Group to look at what the next generation of Ethernet might look like, the Ethernet Alliance says.
I had mentioned earlier this month that the IEEE had a “call for interest” meeting scheduled. Last week the interested parties met and decided there was enough interest to create the study group.
I should note that whatever the “higher speed” ends up being is still up in the air. We just know it will be higher than 10Gbps. The most likely candidates are 40Gbps and 100Gbps.
The push for a higher speed is coming from service providers more than enterprise companies, which was also the case with 10 Gigabit Ethernet.
But with 10 Gigabit, somewhere along the way the pendulum swung back to the enterprise, the IEEE developed a standard for copper-based 10 Gigabit Ethernet, and now we’re starting to see some deployments of 10 Gigabit at the enterprise level.
In addition to copper-based 10 Gigabit Ethernet ramping up, the Ethernet Alliance notes that new small form factor pluggable optics are under development to lower the cost of deploying fiber-based 10 Gigabit and lower power consumption.
But today, the “aggregator” technology is 10 Gigabit, with slower Ethernet connections at 100Mbps or 1Gbps – or even slower, for wireless LANs and legacy connections. The need for aggregating those 10 Gigabit links is really coming from providers of Internet infrastructure. And Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, which likes to get the highest Ethernet speed it possibly can, and is quoted in the Ethernet Alliance press release.
