* Next big IEEE effort in LAN area could be 100 Gigabit Ethernet
With the 10GBase-T standard for 10 Gigabit Ethernet over copper expected to be ratified by the IEEE next month, some are thinking big thoughts about the next logical step: 100 Gigabit Ethernet.
Speeds higher than 10Gbps have long been discussed in a theoretical sense. Would the next step be 40Gbps, perhaps, to coincide with the next major pipe on the SONET track? Or would the IEEE stick to its 10X improvement in speed with each new generation of Ethernet?
It’s starting to look like the 100Gbps camp has an edge. Maybe enough time has elapsed since work began on 10G over copper that folks want to dream in big, round numbers.
The Ethernet Alliance has a series of presentations on its site from DesignCon 2006 a few months ago (see “DesignCon 2006: The Need for 100G Ethernet?”) that lay out the case for 100G.
One of the presenters was Mike Bennett, senior network engineer at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory of the U.S. Department of Energy, who can generally be counted upon to push vendors to the highest speeds possible. There aren’t many power users in the world at his level. Interestingly, he points out that link aggregation, where multiple links are grouped together to increase total throughput, is less than optimal when you get beyond four links.
You’re probably not binding four 10 Gigabit Ethernet links together just yet. But perhaps that day will come.
Brad Booth, director of advanced products at Quake Technologies, says that bandwidth is always growing, so the question isn’t whether 100G Ethernet is required; it’s when will it be economically viable?
He offers a possible timeline for when we might see a standard make its way through the IEEE. If a call for interest happens this summer, he reasons, we could see a standard by early 2010.
