The next high-speed Ethernet standard starts to take shape

Source: Gazettabyte

The IEEE has begun work to develop the next-speed Ethernet standard beyond 100 Gigabit to address significant predicted growth in bandwidth demand. 

The standards body has set up the IEEE 802.3 Industry Connections Higher Speed Ethernet Consensus group, chaired by John D’Ambrosia, who previously chaired the 40 and 100 Gigabit IEEE P802.3ba Ethernet standards ratified in June 2010. "I guess I’m a glutton for punishment,” quips D'Ambrosia. 

The Higher Speed Ethernet standard could be completed by early 2017. 

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Briefing: Flexible elastic-bandwidth networks

Vendors and service providers are implementing the first examples of flexible, elastic-bandwidth networks. Infinera and Microsoft detailed one such network at the Layer123 Terabit Optical and Data Networking conference held earlier this year.

Optical networking expert Ioannis Tomkos of the Athens Information Technology Center explains what is flexible, elastic bandwidth.

Part 1: Flexible elastic bandwidth

"We cannot design anymore optical networks assuming that the available fibre capacity is abundant" 

Prof. Tomkos

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AppliedMicro samples 100Gbps CMOS multiplexer

AppliedMicro has announced the first CMOS merchant multiplexer chip for 100Gbps coherent optical transmission. The S28032 device supports dual polarisation, quadrature phase-shift keying (DP-QPSK) and has a power consumption of 4W, half that of current multiplexer chip designs implemented in BiCMOS.

The S28032 100 Gig multiplexer IC. Source: AppliedMicro

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Cortina unveils multi-channel dispersion compensation chip

Cortina Systems has announced its latest electronic dispersion compensation (EDC) chip.  The CS4342 is a compact device that supports eight duplex 10 Gigabit-per-second (Gbps) links. 

"Some customers are doing 2,000 signals at 10 Gig across the backplane"

Scott Feller, Cortina 

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FSAN adds WDM for next-generation PON standard

The Full Service Access Network (FSAN) group has chosen wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) to complement PON's traditional time-sharing scheme for the NG-PON2 next-generation standard. 

"The technology choice allows us to have a single platform supporting both business and residential services"

Vincent O'Byrne, Verizon

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60-second interview with .... Sterling Perrin

Heavy Reading has published a report Photonic Integration, Super Channels & the March to Terabit Networks. In this 60-second interview, Sterling Perrin, senior analyst at the market research company, talks about the report's findings and the technology's importance for telecom and datacom.

"PICs will be an important part of an ensemble cast, but will not have the starring role. Some may dismiss PICs for this reason, but that would be a mistake – we still need them."

Sterling Perrin, Heavy Reading

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Has the restructuring of the optical industry already started?

The view that consolidation in the optical networking industry is needed is not new. For a decade, ever since the end of the optical boom in 2001, consolidation has been called for and has been expected. And while the many optical startups funded then have long exited or been acquired, the optical industry continues to support numerous optical networking and component generalist and specialists. 

Given the state of the telecom market, is a more fundamental industry restructuring finally on its way? 

"The business model of the communication sector needs to change, and change in a relatively short order"

Larry Schwerin, CEO of Capella Intelligent Subsystems

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