InformationWeek

February 28, 2000

Vendors Aim To Make Ethernet Faster

By Paul Korzeniowski

thernet's top speed was once considered to be 10 Mbps, but vendors are confident they will be able to push that speed to 10 Gbps in another year or two.

Last year, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, which oversees Ethernet development, formed a group to research a 10-Gbps Ethernet standard, known as 802.3ae. And earlier this month, seven technology companies--Cisco Systems, Extreme Networks, Intel, Nortel Networks, Sun Microsystems, 3Com, and World Wide Packets--banded together to form the 10-Gigabit Ethernet Alliance, whose purpose is to support and promote the 10-Gbps Ethernet standard, contribute technical insight to further the standards process, provide resources to demonstrate product interoperability, and foster communication between suppliers and users of the technology.

Users can be confident there will be a migration path once they fill their Gigabit Ethernet lines--but it's still a long-term, rather than short-term, possibility. "I don't expect vendors to start shipping large volumes of 10-Gbps Ethernet connections until 2002," says Todd Hanson, a senior analyst at Dataquest.

The IEEE working group expects to spend this year examining the pros and cons of a handful of proposals to increase the top transmission speed to 10 Gbps, says Bruce Tolley, a product manager at Cisco. Once that phase is completed, standards compliance will have to be incorporated into chip designs, and, eventually, into LAN switches.

"We expect carriers to adopt 10-Gbps Ethernet before enterprise customers do, because the carriers already have a need for that much bandwidth in their network core," says Carlos Zaidi, a business and marketing manager at Nortel Networks.

There are select cases in which enterprise users would require the high-speed option. "We run multiple Gigabit Ethernet links between a few major nodes," says Wilford Parker, network manager at the U.S. Army's Joint Readiness Training Center in Fort Polk, Ala. "Putting all of that information on one line would simplify our management requirements, so we're interested in 10-Gbps Ethernet."

Return to main story, "Companies Are Eager For Gigabit Ethernet."

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