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There is little doubting that Ethernet has had a huge impact on the development of networking technology in recent years. It's ubiquitous presence in homes and data centres across the country has seen it become a vital part of the networking puzzle.
Yet the demands of many systems have changed dramatically in recent years, with a number of systems finding themselves under pressure to process more data under increasingly faster speeds.
The wheels are already in motion to develop 50Gbps, 200 Gbps and 400 Gbps Ethernet over the next three years, meaning that higher speeds are seemingly very much a part of the technology's future.
However, simply increasing speeds could only be one part of developing Ethernet's future, with plans also in place to standardise on slower speeds such as 2.5Gbps, 5Gbps and 25Gbps.
Why anyone would want to look at developing the lower end of a technology will perhaps come as a mystery to many people, but there are plenty of reasons for doing so.
David Chalupsky, Ethernet Alliance BASE-T subcommittee chair and principal engineer at Intel, recently told Network World: “We are now beyond the ‘let’s just go faster’ development of Ethernet and are now looking at developing Ethernet for specific applications.”
Indeed, the evidence suggests there are plenty of applications out there that are demanding these slower speeds, with Chalupsky claiming that many customers are looking at 1Gb/sec and 10G bit/sec Ethernet in order to get the most out of their installed systems.
Being able to access a range of data speeds is especially important when it comes to networked storage, which is an area where there is expected to be a dramatic increase in speeds due to the emergence of several pieces of new technology, which looks set to build upon the impressive speeds of current solid-state drive (SSD) products today.
Another key reason for diversifying the lower end Ethernet speeds is the fact that there has been an increase in demand for products capable of supporting faster data rates on Cat5e and Cat6 twisted-pair copper cables, particularly when it comes to linking up with bandwidth growth driven by wireless 802.11ac Wave 2 Access Points. Currently Category 5e cables connecting switches to wireless access points are limited to just 1-Gigabit speeds.
Jeff Reed, Cisco vice president of enterprise infrastructure and solutions, told Network World “Customers are looking for options here as the wireless component of their network grows – and the 2.5Gb/s would be an economical option."
