IEEE to Study The Feasibility of 400 Gb/s Ethernet
The IEEE has launched the IEEE 802.3 "Standard for Ethernet" study group to explore the development of a 400 GB/s Ethernet standard.
In the August 2012 IEEE 802.3 Ethernet Bandwidth Assessment report, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) predicted that networks will need to support an average of 58 percent compound annual growth rates (CAGRs) with capacity requirements of 1 Tb/s in 2014 and 10 Tb/s in 2020.
To meet the requirements of ever-increasing number of users, Internet enabled devices and services such as video on demand and social media, the IEEE has launched the IEEE 802.3 "Standard for Ethernet" study group to explore the development and 400 Gb/s Ethernet standard to effectively manage this exponential growth in bandwidth requirements.
"Traffic is growing everywhere—more Internet users, more ways to access the Internet more quickly, higher-bandwidth content, new applications enabled, etc.—and it's critical that we move now to create a plan for the Ethernet ecosystem to evolve beyond today's capabilities, in order to accommodate the burgeoning bandwidth tsunami," said John D'Ambrosia, chair of the new IEEE 802.3 400 Gb/s Ethernet Study Group and chief Ethernet evangelist, CTO office, Dell. "The launch of this study group is the next critical step in evolving the IEEE 802.3 standard to stay ahead of industry's needs. It builds on two years of open efforts around inviting Ethernet's vast array of stakeholders into the work of assessing and tackling the market's emerging application requirements."
The IEEE 802.3 "Standards for Ethernet" Study Group will be meeting at the Fairmont Express in Victoria, BC between May 14 and May 17, 2013. Those interested in taking part can view further information and register for the event at its event page.
...the next critical step in evolving the IEEE 802.3 standard to stay ahead of industry's needs.
Am I missing something? How is 400 Gb/s staying ahead of a 1 Tb/s 2014 industry need? Much less 10 Tb's in 2020.
In short, I am all for new ethernet standards but I am more interested to see ISPs either pushing the limit of the metropolitan fiber rings or finding another way to increase speeds to their customers without emptying my wallet.
But how much is there to talk about? Simply extend what they have already been doing for 100GbE (4x25Gbps either as discrete fibers or WDM) to 1Tbps (ex.: 25x 40Gbps DWDM) and call it a day... at that sort of rate and density, the pluggable optics would be large, the interface would be pretty wide, quite power-hungry and the line-card itself would consume multiple slots worth of bandwidth in today's chassis so the exact details of how the fiber side meets the line card/backplane are of relatively little importance... whatever pluggable module spec they might end up publishing, they would end up having to periodically review to accommodate smaller variants as components and power requirements shrink.
So the logical thing to do would be to publish the optical signaling specs to ensure compatibility with future QFP++ modules and let manufacturers deal with how they want to implement the optical-to-card interface until components have shrunk down to manageable sizes that allow fitting 4+ ports per card.
Not many internal networks use more than 10Gbps anywhere near end-users unless your office computers are connected directly to a switch/router that handles substantially more intensive traffic than typical office use.
40+Gbps is mostly used for WAN/MAN/transit networks and telco/cableco/datacenter backbones and major NNIs... we are way beyond the office there. With 100s of Gbps at play there, this is where 400+GbE would be most useful.
Agreed, a lot of companies would still be using Gigabit core switches. Awesome that they are looking into higher Ethernet standards though.
Zero.
The IEEE did not initially intend for there to be an electrical version of 100GbE but they whipped up the 100GBase-CR10 spec just in case someone had the funny idea of hooking that directly to a server but this is not expected to become a common practice any time soon.
In all likelihood, there will never be an electrical spec for 400GbE and beyond.