IEEE defines next speed standard

Author: Brett Thomas
Published: 6th December 2006
Comments (26) Stumble
IEEE defines next speed standard

"They've gone PLAID!" - IEEE sets us to Ludicrous Speed with 100Gb ethernet standards.

Ah, the wonderful world of ethernet. Who here remembers back when 10Mb/s was fast? Then came the dual-use hubs and switches, bringing us all the way to 100Mb. Nowadays, though, you can barely buy a motherboard that doesn't go all the way to a gigabit LAN port, and most of the higher-end models come with two. Of course, gigabit ethernet is just starting to take off as a true consumer appliance - which is why the IEEE has thought ahead to make the next standard.

Rev your engines, guys and girls, we're going two orders of magnitude better than where we were - 100G. One hundred whopping gigabits per second of pure pr0n-downloading pirate power. Err, I mean, pure YouTube watching and MySpace browsing power. Right?

The move has been spurred by the increase in high-bandwidth consumption sites like YouTube, where users are now needing to pull down files on a daily basis that are immensely bigger than they were even a year ago. Streaming video is no longer acceptable at 320x240 - everywhere you look, people are wanting better content, faster...particularly advertisers, who pay a lion's share of the costs needed to keep the internet floating along.

A standard like this will be hard to implement, though. Therefore, the IEEE has appointed a committee to look into it which will start in January of 2007. Don't expect to see hubs hitting the store right after, either...we won't likely start seeing these types of products on shelves until 2009 or 2010. Even then, the new standard is designed for fibre networks, not copper - how this will translate to actual consumer use is anybody's guess.

Hopefully, the new technology will be a powerful upgrade that brings better, faster bandwidth to the end users. As I personally live in a land where connection speeds rarely pass the 2Mbit level without paying in blood, that would certainly be a nice change of pace. Only time will tell, though.

Have you got a thought on IEEE's newest decree? Tell us your hopes for 100G in our forums.
Quote Edhi 6th December 2006, 15:15
I can't see this making a big impact on the end user.
My motherboards have had gigabit ethernet for a few years now, yet the router I bought a couple of months back was still 100mbps, and that's for sharing around the house. My ADSL in comparison is 1mbps.

Unless the telecom co's get serious about rolling out the new technology around the country as soon as it hits, we won't see any difference.
Quote LoneArchon 6th December 2006, 15:19
Will help out backbone connection greatly especially if the new stander can use existing Media. The large ISP can upgrade from 10gb connections to 100gb connections over existing fiber allowing them in turn upgrade user connection speeds
Quote Tulatin 6th December 2006, 15:37
With that ballsy move to hop past 10G and straight to a nitrous fed 100G, they really need to change that name to WEEEEEEE
Quote mclean007 6th December 2006, 15:40
Pretty irrelevant to the end user TBH. Nice though it would be to copy an entire 250 GB hard disk across a network in 20 seconds, I'd like to see a HDD that could deliver that much data, especially over a 3Gbps SATA link! 100 Mbps is more than enough for general home applications, let alone 1 Gbps. The purpose of this technology is obviously to increase network capacity on the internet backbone, plus perhaps for some very limited super high speed connections between servers in some kind of supercomputer / data farm.

That said, the trickle down effect from this will benefit consumers - as backbone capacity increases and its cost decreases commensurately, ISPs will be able to offer larger download caps and/or higher speeds and/or lower costs to end consumers, which can only be a good thing.

EDIT - On a tech geek note, 100 Gbps! Wow that's fast. Just think - a hundred billion bits every. Single. Second! To put that in context, that's enough for 4,000 simultaneous HD channels at 25 Mbps, or 25 uncompressed channels at 1080p 60 Hz 32 bits per pixel (1920*1080*60*32 ~= 4*10^9).

Does that mean we should be expecting Terabit networking in a few years?
Quote Tulatin 6th December 2006, 15:49
we're talking 100gbps here, which comes out to just over 220MB/s. Oh, it's possible, just you'll need a 4-6 disk array of big drives striped.
Quote Firehed 6th December 2006, 15:53
Quote:
Originally Posted by Tulatin
With that ballsy move to hop past 10G and straight to a nitrous fed 100G, they really need to change that name to WEEEEEEE
You can find 10G equipment around, if you're willing to PAY.

Will this affect home use? Not in-home networking (no time soon anyways). But it'll be a nice improvement in all of the backbone infrastructure, which will (theoretically) translate to faster speeds at home at a lower price.

I do all of my home networking at 1Gbit now, and it's a big improvement over 100Mbit. Of course, I've got cheap networking kit so I'm not getting as good throughput as I could, but it's still largely i/o limited. SATA drives are supposed to get bumped to a 6Gbit bus (600MBps after overhead) in '08, but until we move away from magnetic, rotational storage, we'll still be limited to well under 1Gbit. Sure, we'll push forward eventually, but you can be sure that, until we're all doing FTTH boot-to-LAN remote storage, it'll only be affecting the infrastructure rather than what's going on in your walls.
Quote Tulatin 6th December 2006, 15:56
Honestly, though i think this might just be laying the bases for web 2.0. You guys do know what's next - 1TBps Ethernet. :D
Quote WhiskeyAlpha 6th December 2006, 15:57
Quote:
Originally Posted by mclean007
Nice though it would be to copy an entire 250 GB hard disk across a network in 20 seconds, I'd like to see a HDD that could deliver that much data, especially over a 3Gbps SATA link!

I might be wrong but isn't the quoted speed 100Gbps - i.e. 100 Gigabits per second (approx 12,800 Megabytes or 107,374,182,400 bits per second), rather than 100 Gigabytes per second (102,400 Megabytes or 858,993,459,200 bits per second)?

Based on my assumption, the 3Gbps SATA link will give you 384 Megabytes (or 3,221,225,472 bits) per second transfer rate meaning that a 250GB hard disk could theoretically be transferred over a network using the new standard in just over 11 minutes.

It's still chuffing quick either way :)

Edit: I think my calcs are actually way off tbh, I'm checking them now lol. - Done :)
Quote LoneArchon 6th December 2006, 16:13
Quote:
Originally Posted by Tulatin
With that ballsy move to hop past 10G and straight to a nitrous fed 100G, they really need to change that name to WEEEEEEE
The is already an IEEE standard for 10g 802.3an for 10g over twisted pair
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/10_gigabit_Ethernet
Quote Tulatin 6th December 2006, 16:15
I know it's penned and defined, but they're pushing for 100 over 10, yes?
Quote mclean007 6th December 2006, 16:29
Quote:
Originally Posted by Tulatin
we're talking 100gbps here, which comes out to just over 220MB/s. Oh, it's possible, just you'll need a 4-6 disk array of big drives striped.
Er, no, 100Gbps = 100/8 = 12.5 GB/sec
250 GB over a 12.5 GB/sec link = 20 seconds

Even if you could find some magical hard drive that could feed a sustained transfer rate of 100 MB/sec (I'll be impressed if you can), then you'd still need the aggregate throughput of 125 such disks to saturate a 100 Gbps line.
Quote Tulatin 6th December 2006, 16:31
Shoops. Yeah that is definately hard to pull off. I'm supposing you need solid state storage to pull that kind of nutsy thing off.
Quote Hilariousity 6th December 2006, 17:39
LOL I want more pure pr0n-downloading pirate power
Quote DXR_13KE 6th December 2006, 20:22
Quote:
Originally Posted by mclean007
Er, no, 100Gbps = 100/8 = 12.5 GB/sec
250 GB over a 12.5 GB/sec link = 20 seconds

Even if you could find some magical hard drive that could feed a sustained transfer rate of 100 MB/sec (I'll be impressed if you can), then you'd still need the aggregate throughput of 125 such disks to saturate a 100 Gbps line.

the solution= tell everyone it is a way to get instant porn and someone will do it. :D
Quote smoguzbenjamin 6th December 2006, 21:49
You don't need more pr0n downloading pirate power. You've probably got plenty, I haven't seen more than 10Mbps DSL connections and those are pretty expensive. However, think of close-to-zero pings while playing online :) :) :)
Quote Mister_Tad 6th December 2006, 22:07
Quote:
Originally Posted by Tulatin
With that ballsy move to hop past 10G and straight to a nitrous fed 100G, they really need to change that name to WEEEEEEE

10G equipment has been availible for quite some time
Quote Kipman725 6th December 2006, 22:15
thinking of upgrading the house to 10gb/s here... I easily fill up the 100mb/s and think that sometimes even Gb will be saturated with 15 or so pcs transfering files to each other ;)
Quote DXR_13KE 6th December 2006, 22:28
Quote:
Originally Posted by smoguzbenjamin
You don't need more pr0n downloading pirate power. You've probably got plenty, I haven't seen more than 10Mbps DSL connections and those are pretty expensive. However, think of close-to-zero pings while playing online :) :) :)

24Mbps DSL is going for about... 50 euros around here.
Quote Aankhen 7th December 2006, 01:26
Want.

I know that hard disks are a few decades behind. I don't care. I want it NOW. :D
Quote Marquee 7th December 2006, 06:08
Whats the point I don't get more then 10mb per second to my house any way. I want to see more done about broad band internet at speeds of 50mb/s. The 100GB is good for a network but if your main problem is internet bandwidth then maybe speed up the internet. not the home Ethernet cables.
Quote Generic42 7th December 2006, 06:30
So what if my home network could be faster, I don't have a home network. I want my 6Mb/s to be 6MB/s cable. Notice the upper case B, we need faster Internet since that is the main medium on which data is transferred.
Quote stevehp 7th December 2006, 06:40
Colonel Sandurz: Prepare ship for light speed.
Dark Helmet: No, no, no, light speed is too slow.
Colonel Sandurz: Light speed, too slow?
Dark Helmet: Yes, we're gonna have to go right to ludicrous speed.
Quote DougEdey 7th December 2006, 09:30
24MBps/1.6MBps (dependant on distance and shoddy BT cabling) goes for £25 here

24/0.4 IS £14.

Cheap ass.
Quote Cthippo 8th December 2006, 03:12
Quote:
Originally Posted by DXR_13KE
24Mbps DSL is going for about... 50 euros around here.

Brag about it why don't you :(

I'm paying $53 a month for 6 Mb cable because there is nothing faster available out here :'(

On the networking side, I expect to be getting a gigabit switch for Christmas which should increase throughput across my network measurably.
Quote speedfreek 8th December 2006, 04:51
Im just starting to look for a good gigabit router and I heard about the 10 gigabit, and now its looking better and better. But gigabit isnt even a wide standard, all you can find for routers still are the d-link gaming routers though switches are easier to find in gigabit varieties.
Quote Grinch123456 9th December 2006, 01:50
"They've gone PLAID!" Great movie reference. The man who wrote that article is a a genious (sp?).
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