100 Gig Ethernet Coming

As WAN backbones begin to move to 10 gig Ethernet pipes, scientists already are at work on 100 gig versions of Ethernet. Demand for 100 gigabit per second Ethernet is being driven by Iternet exchanges, Carriers and high-performance computing organziations and applications. "You’re also seeing a need when you look at what’s happening with personalized content, which includes video delivery such as YouTube, IPTV and HDTV," says John D’Ambrosia, chairman of the IEEE 802.3 Higher Speed Study Group and a scientist at Force10 Networks Inc. "There’s also video on demand.

"You do have 10G Ethernet already, and if you use link aggregation you can go higher," he says. "But bandwidth needs are quickly surpassing these bandwidth limits." That means we will see new optical transport, backplane and chip technologies.

So even if higher bandwidths are needed, why not just contatenate 10 gig waves? "Depending on who you to talk to, you’ll hear that two, four or eight links can be aggregated together before you have management and troubleshooting issues," says D'Ambrosia. "Also, those cables take up precious real estate, and you have power and cooling considerations." Aggregation also ties up ports that can't be used for anything else, such as bringing in additional revenue. Basically, scaling becomes an issue.