Ethernet's 400-Gigabit Challenge Is a Good Problem To Have 75
alphadogg writes "As it embarks on what's likely to be a long journey to its next big increase in speed, Ethernet is in some ways a victim of its own success. Years ago, birthing a new generation of Ethernet was relatively straightforward: Enterprises wanted faster LANs, vendors figured out ways to achieve that throughput and hashed out a standard, and IT shops bought the speed boost with their next computers and switches. Now it's more complicated, with carriers, Web 2.0 giants, cloud providers, and enterprises all looking for different speeds and interfaces, some more urgently than others. ... That's what the IEEE 802.3 400Gbps Study Group faces as it tries to write the next chapter in Ethernet's history. ... 'You have a lot of different people coming in to the study group,' said John D'Ambrosia, the group's chair, in an interview at the Ethernet Alliance's Technology Exploration Forum in Santa Clara, California, on Tuesday. That can make it harder to reach consensus, with 75 percent approval required to ratify a standard, he said."
Re:Needs more context (Score:3, Insightful)
As I understand it, the problem is more like how to fit 400 1Gbps cables into a single wrapper.
That, and too many conflicting commercial interests.
Patents (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem isn't that you have a bunch of squabbling engineers who can't even figure out how to split a lunch check. It's that you have a bunch of executives and attorneys that want to get as much of their company's IP piled into the standard as possible.
Re:Needs more context (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem is that different users have different requirements: Some will want low power requirements but don't need much range. Some will want more range but don't care much about power consumption and cost of advanced signal processing. Up to 1Gbps, Ethernet was a one-size-fits-all standard, mostly because everyone needed roughly the same: cheap, fast and uses existing cabling as much as possible (implying roughly the same range). Technological advances didn't require the kinds of tradeoff that are necessary now. From 10Gbps onward, Ethernet users have become more diverse and the technical challenges have forced more tradeoffs.
Re:Needs more context (Score:1, Insightful)
CAT6 and CAT6A are not the same, with 6A its does 100M
Not sure what you were reading on wikipedia but both
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category_6_cable
and
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/10-gigabit_Ethernet
as does the IEEE spec.
Re:Needs more context (Score:3, Insightful)
Do you mean Al and not Au (Gold)?