NEW YORK -- Ethernet Expo Americas 2010 -- The price of 100 Gbit/s was the source of more gripes on Wednesday, as optical components got drawn into the mix.

You may recall that Matthew Finnie, CTO of Interoute Communications Ltd., ranted Tuesday about the slow arrival and non-cheapness of 100Gbit/s Ethernet gear. (See EENY 2010: Carrier Wants Cheap 100GigE Now Please.)

Well, Finnie also appeared on a Wednesday panel where the entire topic was 100Gbit/s Ethernet.

This time, though, someone else started the criticisms. Brodie Gage, senior director of transport product line management for Ciena Corp., mentioned that some carriers might not use standard 100Gbit/s optics at first, due to price.

"The cost and availability of those components has been a problem both for vendors and service providers," Gage said.

The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc. (IEEE) 802.3ba standard includes a 100GBase-LR4 interface, which consists of four 25Gbit/s lanes. But Gage said carriers will be more attracted to the LR10 interface, which uses 10 10Gbit/s lanes and isn't standardized.

Verizon Communications Inc. backed him up. "We will be nonstandard as needed," said Nick DelRegno, a principal member of the carrier's technical staff. "What we're seeing is a significant cost delta between the nonstandard LR10 and the standard LR4."

Sticking up a little bit for 100 Gbit/s, Houman Modarres, an Alcatel-Lucent director of marketing, said, "Pricing is by far the biggest obstacle, but there's more texture to it than that."

He was making a point about total cost of ownership, but what's more memorable was that he used the metaphor of buying a puppy: What's expensive isn't the animal, but all the stuff you have to get for it.

Finnie, meanwhile, held his ground that 100Gbit/s pricing is unrealistically high, and he stuck to the price figure he'd mentioned on Tuesday.

"We all know what the price is: It's six times 10 Gbit/s," Finnie said. "I've said it to a few, and they've gotten quite glum."

DelRegno and Finnie reiterated the now familiar call that 100 Gbit/s is overdue. Link aggregation -- the binding together of 10Gbit/s lines -- just isn't efficient enough, they said. And Finnie wasn't keen on the idea of going to 40 Gbit/s. "We'd have to aggregate 40Gbit/s, so what's the point?"

— Craig Matsumoto, West Coast Editor, Light Reading