Where's Our Terabit Ethernet?

carusoj writes "Five years ago, we were talking about using Terabit Ethernet in 2008. Those plans have been pushed back a bit, but Ethernet inventor Bob Metcalfe this week is starting to throw around a new date for Terabit Ethernet: 2015. He's also suggesting that this be done in a non-standard way, at least at first, saying it's an opportunity to "break loose from the stranglehold of standards and move into some fun new technologies.""

Stranglehold?

[Brian Gordon]

I'd like to see the internet held together by his fun new technologies. See how well machines communicate without basic protocols.

Re:Stranglehold?

[KublaiKhan]

I see it as an opportunity for a new standard to evolve in a more natural fashion. Consider HD-DVD v. Blu-Ray--you have two competing formats come out, neither of which is compatible with the other's standard, but after a while it becomes apparent which one is going to be used.

Besides, it's not like this is going to affect TCP or IP or whatnot--this is way down at the bottom of the OSI model at level 1.

Re:Who needs it?

[Alioth]

640k is roughly:

10 Commodore 64s
20 BBC Micros
640 ZX-81s
6 times a SDSS floppy disc

Who needs that kind of memory?

We might not need terabit ethernet *now*, but in 25 years time, it may be the basic expectation of your LAN's speed.

I'd sooner have...

[Channard]

.. a technology that lets homes receive fast internet no matter where they are. My area's not cabled up, and thanks to me being too far from the exchange.. I just live in a normal street .. I can't reliably get more than 512KB a second. Fix that, and you'd be laughing. Powerline networking, maybe?

Re:Stranglehold?

[Jarjarthejedi]

Right, because corporate competitions in which two big companies do their best to ensure that their format wins the battle, with the individuals being frightened that their purchases will become obsolete is soo much fun.

Standards should be decided on BEFORE the material comes out. In this case it's not such a big deal, as the only people who are going to want terabit ethernet are huge enough geeks (or companies) to support whatever standard they choose but for the most part a lack of standards hurts everyone (just look at IE/Office, those are 'competing' standards...would you call them a good thing?)

Re:Who needs it?

[L4t3r4lu5]

Every ISP in the world, to meet the bandwidth allocations they've sold fraudulently.

Re:Who needs it?

[archen]

Switches and machines that aggregate multiple saturated gigabit connections?

Re:Stranglehold?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, but waiting for competing standards to shake out can be a huge waste of time and money.

Doesn't anyone remember the bad old days before TCP/IP over Ethernet became standard?

How many organizations are still laboring to expunge the last remaining vestiges of Token Ring, IPX, Netware, etc.?

Re:Long Time

[sm62704]

7 years is a long time.

Seven years is the blink of an eye, kid.

Re:Who needs it?

[EriDay]

Regional ISPs. This is not a consumer product. Running ethernet on the backbone allows a homogeneous stack on all hosts from end to end.

Re:Who needs it?

[Anonymous Coward]

640k is roughly:


You miss the point.

There is nothing you can do with a big-ass pipe except move bits.

Plugging your firehose into the neighborhood drip irrigation system isn't going to get your lawn watered any faster. In situations where insane bandwidth can be installed end to end and there are insane amounts of data to move, this would be a great thing. However, the GP's point was that this really isn't the most common situation.

Most LANs have TONS of bandwidth to spare today. Work on an Internet (both pipes and servers) that can keep up with my cheap commodity HW LAN. Now, THAT would be useful.

This is not to say that there is no one on earth that needs to move insane amount of data in a LAN. Good on them. However just that increasing LAN speed won't help most folks while they wait for "the network"

Re:Stranglehold?

[geekoid]

I think you don't understand where he is coming from.

You would need to use the existing protocols on some level, but the protaocols to hit terabyte might need to be different. So he is saying Think about how to get reach the goal firsts, then delve into the protocol arena. If it is superior then eventually we would discard the older protocols and only use the new one.

Re:Stranglehold?

[moderatorrater]

In this case it's not such a big deal, as the only people who are going to want [HD players] are huge enough geeks (or companies) to support whatever standard they choose

Your quote applies equally well to his example as to what you were saying.

just look at IE/Office, those are 'competing' standards...would you call them a good thing?

They're not standards at all, that's the problem. IE's supposed to be compatible with the standard and it's not, so your example seems moot. Office has no standard at all, which would seem to be compatible with the discussion, but the big difference is that it's gone well beyond the point where there should have been a standard.

However, I don't think any products should make it to the market before there's a standard developed. Computer equipment has a way of going outdated very quickly when there's no standard attached, and I sure as hell wouldn't want to buy $1000 worth of equipment only to have everyone standardize to a different technology and leave me in the cold. At least your HD-DVD's will still play, if everyone switches to one type when you bought into the other type, your equipment becomes worthless.

Re:Who needs it?

[jandrese]

Maybe. One of the things that I've noticed is that as the bandwidth increases it becomes harder and harder to fill it up. Back in the Commodore 64 days it was not hard at all to run your machine out of memory by just typing a paper that was too long, and that's without graphics/charts/etc... These days there is no way a person would be able to type enough text to even make a noticeable dent in the main memory of any commodity machine. When everybody used 56k modems and serial lines it was trivially easy to fill up the link. However, when they moved to 10Mb Ethernet it got harder, but not impossible. Suddenly compressed music files were not a problem, although compressed video (DivX) still was. Then we went to 100Mb Ethernet and compressed video is no longer much of a bottleneck. Even now most modern machines come with Gigabit Ethernet ports that your average person can't fill with anything. Without new and bandwith intensive applications people won't be inclined to improve their bandwidth.

That's not to say someone won't come up with some application that requires a ton of bandwidth (distributed neural nets?), but none of our current applications would even really scale up to requiring 10GbE. The only realistic thing that comes to mind is some sort of Super HD video format, but anything like that is at least a decade away.

Re:For those of you playing at home, a TB is

[Macrat]

1Gbs is a bit slow when backup up a 1TB hard drive to the network server at home. ;-)

Put off in favor of wireless.

[scaryjohn]

I humbly submit that the R&D money that could have increased the upper boundary of Ethernet speeds was spent to bring wireless to the masses. Five years ago, if you'd told me WiFi would now be a year away from nominal speeds of 250Mb/s I might have thought you were talking about prototypes. The dorms where I was a tech had just finished upgrading from 10Mb/s to 100Mb/s Ethernet. The few laptops that were sold with external wireless cards had nominal speeds of 10Mb/s. But now we have 802.11g and next year we should have 802.11n on the store shelves.

I think we've gained much more by pushing out the median speed of wireless than we could have gained from pushing out the marginal speed of twisted pair.

Re:Who needs it?

[FrzrBrn]

It's not a question of your end points needing that kind of bandwidth, it's a question of the links between ISPs and such. Look at any of the large router manufacturers today and see what kind of interfaces they're putting on their high-end gear: multiple 10Gbps ports. You can safely believe that if 100Gbps were available now that people would be using it. The step to 1Tbps is a large one, but there's no such things as "too much" bandwidth.

Re:Who needs it?

[Anonymous Coward]

There is nothing you can do with a big-ass pipe except move bits.

Free clue: 10Gb ethernet is currently used mostly in clusters and as backbones for large network installations to move lots of data around very fast. It's a long way off being a LAN technology. In seven years time, Terabit ethernet will be used mostly in clusters and as backbones for large network installations and 10Gb ethernet will be a LAN technology.

Re:Who needs it?

[ortholattice]

640k is roughly:....

- over 10 DEC PDP-11/45s running the RSTS time-sharing system

The maximum memory on these things was 28K words (16-bit) without memory extension hardware. In the 70s we had 8 users on a system with 28K of memory sorting lists, printing reports, data entry, editing with TECO, batch runs in the background at low priority, with relatively few swap thrashing problems. I implemented an ultra-low priority batch mode that waited until there was nothing else running for 5 minutes before activating a u.l.p job, then swapped it out instantly as soon as someone pressed a key - amazing what you could do with its sys calls. I did all sorts of hobby computing in this mode (with employer's permission) - looking for Fermat number factors, analyzing stock market timing data for patterns, you name it - I was like a kid in a candy store.

In retrospect, it was simply amazing how they shrunk it into that amount of memory and amazing how much I could do with it. 640K was simply unimaginable at that time.

Re:I'd sooner have...

[Anti_Climax]

Well if you're in the US, the greatest probability has you in the ATT/SBC/Bellsouth regions. Regardless of your ILEC, did they stick you with a shitty CPE like an actiontec or speedstream? If so switch it for something with a decent AFE like a 2Wire and you might be able to push that more toward the 1Mbit range. Not much of an increase but better than nothing.

Also remember that, even if you get a decent DSL modem, they may still have you allocated under a lower performance profile just out of average expectation of attainable speed. If you contact tech support and you're lucky enough to get someone knowledgeable, they can get you in contact with the group that actually manage the provisioning at the DSLAM and get them to try some higher rate settings on their end.

Good luck.

Re:For those of you playing at home, a TB is

[Anonymous Coward]

1 Gb is 128 MBs. According to Storagereview.com the Seagate Barracuda ES.2 is the only terabyte drive that has a transfer rate (104 MB/s) which maxes out high enough to even come near filling a gigabit pipe.

The bottleneck is your hard drive.

If you use just one hard drive, that might be true. These days, though, most people with those sorts of storage transfer issues have RAID-5 sources.

I know that the network is my bottleneck when copying from a 7-drive RAID-5 (6x SATA-300 effective data throughput...easily 200MB/sec) through a PCIe 8x host adapter (2000MB/sec) to the gigabit ethernet (125MB/sec).

On the other hand, if I'm not backing up multi-gigabytes of data, normal access over the network isn't much slower than local drives for real-world performance, especially with the large caches in the servers that avoid the disk altogether.