InformationWeek

But at this week's NetWorld+ Interop show in Las Vegas, networking heavyweights Cisco Systems and 3Com Corp. will unveil 1000Base-T NICs for pushing Ethernet packets across Category 5 copper wiring at gigabit speeds. They join the ranks of gigabit networking vendors Alteon WebSystems, Extreme Networks, Foundry Networks, Intel, and SysKonnect, which have recently begun shipping products.

For power users working with large graphics files, collaborative engineering, or video-streaming applications, the relief can't come soon enough. They're anxious to preserve their investment in copper cabling and avoid the cost of installing fiber and its associated electronics, which are always pricier than copper or coaxial cable.

"Fiber's a giant pain,'' says Clark Graff, president of Graff Network Services, an engineering company in Marina Del Rey, Calif., that supports clients in the entertainment industry. "Ever try to put the connectors on those things? Forget it. Fiber's also kind of sensitive--you can't bump into the equipment without causing problems."

Gigabit Ethernet over copper is a natural for just about any enterprise, capitalizing on IT managers' familiarity with the Ethernet protocol, the ubiquity of Category 5 cabling, and users' limitless appetite for speed and throughput. While companies installing cabling these days are likely to run both copper and fiber to or near desktops, retrofitting with fiber cable runs about $500 per user for materials and labor alone.

And many businesses consider fiber to the desktop needless gold plating. "IEEE surveys show that only 1% of the North American customer base is deploying fiber to the desktop," says Bruce Tolley, marketing manager in Cisco's workgroup business unit. Copper is considered less secure, he says, which is why its use is forbidden for some users in the Defense Department, on Wall Street, or in certain industrial applications.

The Dell'Oro Group, a networking research firm, estimates that the total market for Gigabit Ethernet this year will hit 4.4 million ports. "We think about 15% of those ports will be copper," says Greg Collins, a director for the consulting firm. Average per-port pricing for Gigabit Ethernet over copper should run around $500, he says. In contrast, fiber ports are priced closer to $800 apiece.

By 2004, Collins projects that 30 million ports will be shipped--and half of those could be copper, depending on pricing. "If prices come down quite quickly, it's possible that the uptake on copper ports will be faster than anticipated," he says, adding that copper prices are expected to fall more quickly than those for fiber.

The 1000Base-T spec supports auto-negotiation between 10-, 100-, and 1000-Mbps Ethernet, says Cisco's Tolley, who's also VP of the 10 Gigabit Ethernet Alliance. "Over the next two years, the value proposition for customers could be that they deploy these triple-speed NICs and switches wherever they might think they need investment protection or a bandwidth upgrade path," he says. "Buying equipment that's speed-agile lets customers dial up that extra bandwidth when they need it."

That's one vendor claim early adopters are already confirming. "I was testing 12,000 users over Roadrunner software on a three-tier project," says an IT manager at a large software company who asked not to be identified. "With 10/100 Mbps Ethernet, I can get about 80% saturation of the pipe. But with 1000, it didn't even use 20%. If we end up using this just for E-mail and people accessing servers, this will really keep the network going smoothly. And if 40 people in accounting hit the database at the same time, they won't even notice it."

That sort of performance is what Graff is looking for on an animated feature his company's working on called Dungeons and Dragons. He says he was struck by the ease of deployment with the three copper NICs he bought from SysKonnect. Graff Network Services plugged the NICs into a Hewlett-Packard ProCurve switch. On one side, it has 26 Windows NT boxes and four Silicon Graphics machines running different animation software on 100Base-T; on the other are three machines running Gigabit Ethernet--the main server and two high-end compositing machines, says Graff. From there, six rendering machines pass gigabits of data to the compositors.

"Out of every 10 frames you render, you use one. Each frame is about 10 Mbytes worth of data and you get 24 frames per second," Graff says. Capacity and speed become paramount in a hurry.