A new group will tackle an issue that’s been a hot debate in communications for at least two years—should the next big leap for Ethernet be to 400 Gbits/second or a Terabit/s. The IEEE 802.3 Industry Connections Higher Speed Ethernet Consensus group aims within a year to pick a target and kick off a formal standards effort.

The news comes as the IEEE 802.3 group overseeing Ethernet officially publishes its Ethernet Bandwidth Assessment report. The report, developed over the course of the last year, validated the group’s conclusions from an earlier study that demand for bandwidth is doubling about every 24 months. At that rate, networks will need to support capacity requirements of a terabit per second in 2015 and 10 terabit per second by 2020, it said.

“Everyone is worried about the coming tsunami of data,” said John D’Ambrosia, a veteran Ethernet standards organizer and chair of the new consensus group. “There’s a lot of nervousness out there about how people will do it in a cost effective manner,” he said.

The news comes as the IEEE 802.3 group overseeing Ethernet officially publishes its Ethernet Bandwidth Assessment report. The report, developed over the course of the last year, validated the group’s conclusions from an earlier study that demand for bandwidth is doubling about every 24 months. At that rate, networks will need to support capacity requirements of a terabit per second in 2015 and 10 terabit per second by 2020, it said.

“Everyone is worried about the coming tsunami of data,” said John D’Ambrosia, a veteran Ethernet standards organizer and chair of the new consensus group. “There’s a lot of nervousness out there about how people will do it in a cost effective manner,” he said.

Engineers are currently hammering out specifications for 25 Gbit/s serial lanes and starting work on 50 Gbit/s channels at the Optical Internetworking Forum. It would take 20 to 40 of those fastest channels working in parallel to deliver TBit/s Ethernet rates.

The consensus group could decide to set both 400G and a Tbit as parallel goals. The last big Ethernet effort simultaneously delivered standards for 40 and 100G to serve different markets.