re: Terabit EthernetBut then as a minimum, it could infuse $100Ms of R&D investment for some really cool technology work. At least now, aggregate access bandwidth is pretty high, unlike the Terabit hype in the '90's when everyone was still on dial up... Still, I'd like to know where he sees the BW inflection point that will drive this.
re: Terabit EthernetYeah, noted. I'm wondering, too, if he forsees some application (high-def social networking on mobile phones, heaven forbid) that will kick off the demand.
re: Terabit Ethernet Carriers are headed to Ethernet because the Enterprise is basically fully Ethernet. If there is no Enterprise Market for Terabit Ethernet, there is not likely to be the assured market for chip makers to get devices in place for it.
With the buy in of the Enterprise, there is a market to drive down costs with much higher margins than one gets in the carrier business.
I doubt they would go near it. Take away the message that it is a technology that everyone knows and understands and the only real value left is the packet format and lack of need to translate between transport infrastructure and systems.
I would be interested to know to what extent the packetization is what Ethernet has become? We see Ethernet packets carried in MPLS across Ethernet transport using MPLS as a control plane. If we can drive the capacity then that's great, I can imagine that we might need to think again about how long the systems (routers) connecting these links can handle the volume of control plane traffic being carried. I am not a fan of PBT but it points the way towards the control plane needing to become decoupled from the forwarding plane, meaning that Ethernet just becomes a packet encoded on to a wire at higher and higher capacities.
Offline path computation and signalling should allow for data connections to be more temporary and allowing Resource Admission Control and other IMS related SOA architectures. The world is a million miles away from truely delivering all of this and the longer router vendors own the control plane the longer it will take. Perhaps Terabit Ethernet will pave the way for generic hardware and introduce new entrants into the market for control plane software.
Will it work over 10Base2?
Does it use CSMA-CD?
Does the repeater rule still apply?
or the question I was genuinely asked once...
If you attach the 2 ends of a length of thin-ethernet cable together, is that Token Ring?
Metroman