100 Gigabit Ethernet standard ratified
Oh, and 40Gb/s too
It's official: the IEEE 802.3ba 40Gb/s and 100Gb/s Ethernet standard has been ratified by — who else? — the IEEE P802.3ba 40Gb/s and 100Gb/s Ethernet Task Force.
"Ubiquitous adoption of bandwidth-intensive technologies and applications, such as converged network services, video-on-demand, and social networking, is producing rapidly increasing demand for higher-rate throughput," the Task Force's chair, John D'Ambrosia, said in a prepared understatement.
Non-standard 100Gb/s setups have already appeared in the field — for example, the Dutch education networkers at SURFnet announced Monday that they had achieved 100Gb/s speeds on T Series Core Routers from Juniper Networks. GlobalQuotes notes that Cisco, Brocade, and Extreme Networks have also developed 100Gb/s Ethernet routers, cards, and switches.
But as was true after the long and painful 802.11n wireless networking standards process, developers of current 100Gb/s hardware shouldn't have a difficult time making the necessary tweaks — if any — to be fully 802.3ba-compliant.
Speaking of his company's product, for example, Juniper exec Luc Ceuppens told Techworld: "It is based on the standard as it was [in late 2009]. Changes made this year did not materially impact the product. I don't think we need to [modify] it."
One beneficiary of the standardization of 802.3ba will be 10Gb/s Ethernet. As 802.3ba interconnects find their way into data centers, those relatvely "slow" 10Gb/s Ethernet streams will find plenty of bandwidth for aggregation.
Everybody wins, according to David Law, chair of the IEEE 802.3 working group: "This is truly a forward-looking standard that will spur innovation at every point along the Ethernet value chain, as well as providing the essential architecture needed to facilitate greater broadband connectivity on a global scale,” he said.
Information on the 802.3ba standard can be found here. CDs with the standard will be available for purchase from the IEEE on Tuesday, and a PDF next Tuesday. ®
Bootnote
When Apple's Macintosh was released in January 1984, it was the first mass-market PC to have networking built in, with LocalTalk hardware transmitting info at 230.4Kb/s. The new 802.3ba standard supports throughput at a theoretical speed that's 434,027.8 times faster.
COMMENTS
Was it the first?
"...When Apple's Macintosh was released in January 1984, it was the first mass-market PC to have networking built in.."
Not sure what you mean by the 'first' - you could buy a BBC B with built-in (on the motherboard) EcoNet in 1981-2. Not many of this varient were sold in the UK (not many UK homes had a multi-system network requirement then), but all the US export ones had this in 1983....
Fanbois alert
You can tell this journo is an Apple Fanboi, automatic assumption that Apple invented everything first.
FFS : Moores Law is about # of transistors !
Geezus... "Moores law" was only ever about the number of transistors in a single integrated circuit.
If I might equally inappropriately invoke "Newton's inverse square Law", it [Moores Law] has the square root of F-All to do with network throughput, speed, capacity or anything else other than that to which Moores Law actually refers.
I wish people would stop invoking Moore's Law every time some spurious aspect of computing technology/specification comes up, especially SPEED, which for some reason seems especially to attract abuse of poor old Moore.
The connection over the years between Moore's Law and any metric other than transistor count is entirely coincidental.
Fiber to the Premises
Until FTTP or FTTH connections become available in your neighborhood, don't count on it. Even this announcement (mostly) assumes fiber optics for transmissions (the copper specs don't permit more than 10m for 100GBASE-CR10 connections). It's a safe assumption that all that copper used for local loops won't ever likely support much more than 6Mbps unless you're super-close to your Telco central office (less than 1km).
