Is your Ethernet fast enough Four new speeds are in the works

At a meeting last Thursday of the Ethernet Alliance, an industry group that promotes IEEE Ethernet standards, three major new projects were up for discussion.

To meet immediate demands in cloud data centers, there's a standard in the works for 25Gbps (bits per second). For the kinds of traffic expected in those clouds a few years from now, experts are already discussing a 50Gbps specification. And for enterprises with new, fast Wi-Fi access points, there may soon be 2.5Gbps Ethernet. That's in addition to the next top speed for carrier backbones and moves to adapt the technology for use in cars.

These efforts are all meant to serve a growing demand for Ethernet outside the traditional enterprise LANs for which it was originally designed. That means solving multiple problems instead of just how to get ever more bits onto a fiber or copper wire.

"What I'm hearing is lots of diversity. Lots of diversity in need, lots of diversity for the future," Ethernet Alliance Chair John D'Ambrosia said part way into the daylong meeting in Santa Clara, California. "We're moving away from an 'Ethernet everywhere' with essentially the same sort of flavor."

The EA's annual Technology Exploration Forum is a venue for discussing the kinds of technical details that many participants will go on to debate in various task groups of the IEEE 802.3 Working Group, which sets the official standards for Ethernet. Optical and electrical signaling, fiber strands and copper wires, processing power, energy consumption, heat, cost, and other issues all come into play in determining what to build and how.