Will faster Ethernet life begin at 40GbE?

The IEEE is facing growing pressure to come up with a standard for 40Gbit/s Ethernet

A report released by the US Internet Industry Association on 1 May called 'The Exabyte Internet' highlighted a looming networking crisis. It included research from IDC estimating that the amount of information created and copied will surge more than six-fold to 988 exabytes by 2010 – a compound annual growth rate of 57 percent. One exabyte equals a million terabytes.

The report warned that investment in network infrastructure is not increasing fast enough to cope with the rapid growth in the amount of traffic being channelled over the internet.

To address this problem, the Institute of Electronics and Electrical Engineers (IEEE) set up the 802.3 High Speed Study Group (HSSG) in July 2006 to decide on its next standard for data transmission speeds. Although 100 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) was initially set as the target to aim for, the last meeting of the IEEE HSSG in late May showed that there is considerable support for an interim standard of 40GbE. The debate on whether or not to go for the less ambitious target will no doubt continue at the group’s next meeting, due to take place this month in San Francisco.

Optical transmission vendor Ciena's chief technologist, John-Paul Hemmingway, said the main thing 40GbE has in its favour is that the technology is already available. “It’s the adoption of 40GbE on the big IP routers that’s driving further 40GbE technology,” he said.

Optical comms vendor Infinera's network architecture vice-president Serge Melle pointed out that the IEEE HSSG had moved pretty quickly to define a 100GbE standard. He said that there was a demand not just from telcos but also from companies such as Google, Yahoo and others. “These users are championing the need for 100GbE technology, which wasn’t the case when the 10GbE standard was being defined. It was the vendors who were the primary movers at that time,” he said.

Hemmingway agreed that there is growing demand for 100GbE, and is actively promoting 40Gbit/s and 100Gbit/s technologies, “It’s not just the R&D departments like Janet [the UK Joint Academic Network] that need faster connectivity, telcos also need 40Gbit/s speeds right now. I think 40GbE is a stepping stone and that everybody will go to 100GbE eventually, but I don’t see it being deployed till 2009 or 2010,” he said.

Janet recently announced that it is having to put in 40Gbit/s links to aggregate 10Gbit/s streams at London Docklands, due to rapidly growing traffic levels. “A lot of our external connectivity goes through the London Docklands internet backbone, and this is one of the key pressure points for us,” a spokesman said.