Source: http://www.cablinginstall.com/index/display/article-display/7476998172/articles/cabling-installation-maintenance/news/cabling-standards/ieee/2012/august/ethernet-bandwidth.html?cmpid=EnlContractorSeptember52012

Multiple newspapers in Spain report that Telefónica España has tested DWDM channel speeds of 400 Gbps on a live fiber-optic network. The tests were carried out to check the feasibility of using 400-Gbps channels on systems already carrying live customer traffic, and to demonstrate that Telefónica’s network will be able to support very high-speed traffic needs in the future. However, the reports say the operator doesn’t anticipate installing such links on a commercial basis until 2013 at the earliest.

Source: http://www.cablinginstall.com/index/display/article-display.articles.cabling-installation-maintenance.news.connectivity-technologies.fiber-optic-connectors.2012.january.spain-tests_live_400g.html

Without Ethernet our networked world would cease to exist. Without Ethernet development the internet will choke.

The Ethernet Alliance brings together vendors, including AT&T, Brocade, Cisco, Dell, NetApp, QLogic and many others, dedicated to the expansion of the Ethernet ecosystem that makes this networked world work.

Kipp believes Ethernet is a marvel. “It’s the ubiquitous standard for local area networks, and as emerging applications push the innovation boundary you’d be hard-pressed to find one that doesn’t rely on Ethernet somewhere along the line. It’s truly the network technology of choice,” he says.

“The internet is probably Ethernet’s greatest triumph. Every server that delivers content to the internet is networked via Ethernet.
Scott G. Kipp

“Society is moving to a new level of interconnectedness that’s built solidly upon the Ethernet ecosystem. Think about some of the applications that have become a permanent part of today’s technology mosaic – Facebook, Twitter, Skype – those technologies are served up via Ethernet.”

At a time when the networking world is thinking practical thoughts about 40GbE and 100GbE, it is obvious to Ethernet technologists that, given the rapid data growth we are seeing, these speeds are not enough.

Where does Kipp think the future of Ethernet lies?

“It’s hard to express the full scope of where Ethernet will be in 20, ten or even just five years,” he says.

“Cisco’s Visual Networking Index predicts that in 2015, we’ll see about a zettabyte of information running across the internet. That’s about a billion terabytes. The networking world is entering the ZB era. The storage world is already there, according to IDC’s Digital Universe Study.

“We’re going to need more links at higher speed and we’re expecting 400GbE or Terabit Ethernet to be next.”

“Parallel optics will be stepping stones to tomorrow’s generation of Ethernet speeds.”

A few years ago, 100GbE would have seemed like fantasy. Today it is becoming reality.

Terabit Ethernet will surely go the same route, from technology dream through standardisation and production to everyday reality.

Broadcom Corp Tuesday (April 24) announced its fourth-generation Ethernet network processor, which it claims is the industry’s first chip to use massive parallelism by virtue of its 64 packet-processing cores running at one gigahertz. Providing full-duplex 100Gbit per second performance, it can also be configured to provide a dozen 10-Gbit channels.

Broadcom claims that by the end of 2012, the number of Internet-connected devices will exceed 7 billion.

“By 2015, there will be twice as many devices connected to the Internet as there are people in the world, many of which will be streaming video,” said Dan Harding, senior director of marketing, infrastructure and networking at Broadcom. “As a result of this increasing demand for bandwidth, the core of the network is going to need upgrading to 100Gbit Ethernet over the next four years.”

Broadcom Corp. Tuesday (April 24) announced its fourth-generation Ethernet network processor, which it claims is the industry’s first chip to use massive parallelism by virtue of its 64 packet-processing cores running at one gigahertz. Providing full-duplex 100Gbit per second performance, it can also be configured to provide a dozen 10-Gbit channels.

Using 40-nanometer design rules for its array of 64 packet processors, the BCM88030 also includes seven on-chip accelerators for common functions including a programmable algorithmic look-up engine for massive IPv6 tables using low cost DDR-3 DRAM, algorithmic access control list using Broadcom’s proprietary knowledge based processor, as well as a high-speed packet parser and classifier.

“By 2015, there will be twice as many devices connected to the Internet as there are people in the world, many of which will be streaming video,”

Broadcom claims that by the end of 2012, the number of Internet-connected devices will exceed 7 billion. Over the next four years the majority of the content accessed from mobile devices will be high-bandwidth streaming video, according to Broadcom. What’s worse, application downloads will balloon to 47 billion per year, according to the firm.

To meet this demand, Internet service providers are quickly adopting 100-gigabit-per-second Ethernet, which is estimated to grow at a rate of 170 percent over the next five years, according to Infonetics Research Inc. (Campbell, Calif.)

Many of the 100G demonstrations at OFC 2012 focused on testing four-lane (4×25G/4×28G) implementations with electrical/PHY tests on a couple of key measurement parameters:
The BER performance tied to an eye diagram
The amount of crosstalk evident in the jitter results
What does this mean for test labs around the high-speed networking industry?

Along with the scope, a BER tester suitable for 25+ G makes sense, for a couple of reasons. First, the BER tester can serve as a test-pattern generator to help determine stress points in a measurement setup (stimulate crosstalk aggressors, for example). It can also be used to evaluate true bit-error-rate calculations, as well.

If you want 10 Gigabit Ethernet to take off on servers, then you need fat backbones on the campuses and in the data centers to absorb the increase in traffic. And so Cisco Systems is ramping up the bandwidth on its Nexus 7000 series of end-of-row converged Ethernet switches as well as on its Catalyst 6500 campus switches.

Server motherboard makers are expected to start laying down 10GE ports on their boards in greater numbers, and that is when the 10GE ramp will take off in earnest.

The 100GBASE-R4 physical layer device converts 10-lanes running 10Gbps (CAUI) to 4-lanes running 25Gbps.

The 20-lane output from the PCS interfaces to the first PMA, which multiplexes the 20-logical lanes to generate the pin-efficient CAUI interface. The CAUI interface defines 10-lanes running 10.3125Gbps.

Recently ratified, the 100Gigabit Ethernet Standard, (IEEE802.3ba) defines a 100GBASE-LR4 and 100GBASE-ER4 interface for optical interfaces on single-mode fiber. The architecture includes the Physical Coding sub layer (PCS), connected on one side to the reconciliation sub-layer (RS) and MAC and to the PMA/PMD on the other side.

The IEEE standard for 100GBASE-LR4 and 100GBASE-ER4 communications defines a lane alignment strategy at the PCS layers that simplifies system design.

In this Product How-To article, James Wilson of Silicon Labs describes the clocking requirements in next generation 10G to 100G networks using high speed optical links

There are four key challenges for clock generation in 40/100G optical line cards: frequency flexibility, clock jitter, cross-talk mitigation and phased-locked loop (PLL) integration.

Since 40/100G systems often must support a variety of protocols, including OTU3, OTU4, 10GbE and 100GbE, they also require multiple reference frequencies.