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. (NYSE: CIEN), 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. (NYSE: VZ) 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 (NYSE: ALU) 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