New standard for 40 & 100Gbps ethernet ratified

Stuart Corner
Tuesday, 22 June 2010 10:36

Business IT - Technology

The IEEE has ratified a new ethernet standard covering operation at both 40Gbps and 100Gbps; it is the first to specify two different speeds.

According to IEEE, the new standard will help meet "an explosive demand for increased bandwidth," and "sets the stage for next wave of technology innovation."

The new standard, IEEE 802.3ba is an amendment to the IEEE 802.3 ethernet standard and IEEE says that collaboration between the IEEE P802.3ba 40Gbps and 100Gbps Ethernet Task Force and the International Telecommunication Union's Telecommunication Standardisation Sector (ITU-T) Study Group 15 "ensures these new ethernet rates are transportable over optical transport networks."

The director of ITU-T, Malcolm Johnson, said: "Co-hosted meetings and workshops, and a recognition that close collaboration was mutually beneficial, has led IEEE and ITU to agree a common mapping between the IEEE P802.3ba 40Gbps and 100Gbps standard and the ITU-T G.709 optical network standard. I have no doubt that the scalability provided by this excellent example of standards collaboration will see an acceleration in end-to-end ethernet deployment."

According to task force chair, John D'Ambrosia - also director for ethernet-based standards in the CTO Office of Force10 Networks - "Ubiquitous adoption of bandwidth-intensive technologies and applications, such as converged network services, video-on-demand, and social networking, is producing rapidly increasing demand for higher-rate throughput.

"Mass-market access to these technologies'¦coupled with today's progressively more powerful server architectures [means that] data centres, network providers and end-users alike are finding themselves confronted by pressing bandwidth bottlenecks.

"IEEE 802.3ba will eliminate these bottlenecks by providing a robust, scalable architecture for meeting current bandwidth requirements and laying a solid foundation for future ethernet speed increases."

IEEE says the standard's ratification "dovetails into efforts aimed at delivering greater broadband access, such as the US Federal Communication Commission's 'Connecting America' National Broadband Plan, which calls for 100Mbps access for a minimum of 100 million homes across the US."

The CD version of the approved standard is available for purchase on June 22 at shop.ieee.org. The PDF version will be available for purchase via shop.ieee.org on June 29.