From...

February 14, 2000
Web posted at: 8:33 a.m. EST (1333 GMT)

by Jeff Caruso

(IDG) -- With momentum building around high-speed Ethernet, a group of vendors established the 10-Gigabit Ethernet Alliance to propagate the technology.

The organization mirrors the Gigabit Ethernet Alliance, which was formed four years ago to publicize work on Gigabit Ethernet and foster interoperability among LAN equipment vendors. The new group hopes to achieve similar success in these areas with 10-Gigabit Ethernet.

Although 10 billion bits per second seems like a lot of bandwidth, users will find a way to use up the bandwidth available to them, says Mike McConnell, a director at Infonetics Research in San Jose. "If you build it, they will fill it," he says.

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There are seven founding members, including 3Com, Cisco and Extreme Networks. The alliance hopes to recruit charter members within the next month.

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The formation comes just after the IEEE decided to promote the study group looking at 10-Gigabit to a task force, giving it the designation 802.3ae. The task force hopes to reach a standard by March 2002.

"That is a very, very aggressive goal," acknowledges Bruce Tolley, vice president of the new alliance.

The group has decided to specify technologies for sending 10G bit/sec for 100 meters over installed multimode fiber-optic lines; 300 meters over new multimode fiber; and distances of 2, 10 and 40 kilometers over single-mode fiber.

Most of the challenge that lies ahead will be in crafting lasers and optics that will be able to transmit at these distances while keeping costs down, Tolley says.

Some parts of 10-Gigabit Ethernet will be different than previous versions of Ethernet. The specification won't include collision detection, for instance, because 10-Gigabit won't be running half-duplex. Only full-duplex operation will be specified.

This technology is also being readied for metropolitan- and wide-area networks, breaking away from Ethernet's roots in the LAN.