Submission + - Ethernet Zooms to 100 Gigabit Speeds
Doc Ruby writes: As reported at GigaOM, 'Infinera has bonded 10 parallel 10 Gb/s channels into one logical flow while maintaining packet ordering at the receiver', bridging 100Gbps ethernet over 10 10Gbps optical WAN links:
With most data we prosume now large multimedia objects/streams, mostly networked, we're all going to want our share of these 100Gbps networks. The current network retailers, mainly cable and DSL dealers, still haven't brought even 10Mbps to most homes, though they're now bringing Fiber to the Premises to some rich/lucky customers. Are they laying fiber that will bring them to Tbps, or will that stuff clog the way to getting these speeds ourselves?Infinera, a San Jose, Calif.-based start-up, along with University of California, Santa Cruz, Internet2 and Level3 Communications, today demonstrated a 100 gigabit/second Ethernet connection that could carry data over a 4000 kilometer fiber network. The trial took place at the Super Computing Show in Tampa, Florida. The experimental system was set up between Tampa, Florida and Houston, Texas, and back again. A 100 GbE signal was spliced into ten 10 Gb/s streams using an Infinera-proposed specification for 100GbE across multiple links. The splicing of the signal is based on a packet-reordering algorithm developed at the University of California at Santa Cruz. This algorithm preserves packet order even as individual flows are striped across multiple wavelengths. [...] [A]bout 14 months ago we wrote about the 10 GB/s network4 that connected the University of California, San Diego and NASA Goddard Space Flight Center over a dedicated optical path. [...] [Infinera co-founder and CTO Drew Perkins] said that the trial today shows that you can build scalable systems that can achieve higher speeds.
