Sandra Gittlen writes (22 Nov. 2006) about an IEEE study group that's been formed to develop standards that will take Ethernet beyond its current upper limit of 10 billion bits per second (10 Gigabits):
... "Traffic is doubling every 12 to 14 months. If the industry can't come up with a solution soon, we'll become bandwidth constrained," says Lane Patterson, CTO of Equinix, an Internet exchange carrier in Foster City, Calif. ¶ At the YouTube Web site, traffic at peak times is hitting 25Gbps and is expected to climb to 75Gbps soon. "User traffic to our site is continuing to grow. We add multiple 10-gig circuits a month to meet this growth," says Colin Corbett, director of networking. ...
... "There is a dynamic happening in the marketplace, where there is a shift in how video is used and consumed by customers," says Suraj Shetty, director of Cisco's Service Provider Routing Technology Group. ¶ Shetty points to new services -- business- and consumer-oriented -- that enable real-time global viewership. It's this move to mass consumption of video that is straining worldwide resources and sparking the need to move beyond 10G Ethernet, he says. ...
Link: Network World.
Also see a later (22 Jan. 2007) interview by Gittlen with John D'Ambrosia, who is chairman of that study group. On the Horizon: 100 Gigabit Ethernet. Link: Network World. --Dennis
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