Rust Valley

Those of you who aren’t network geeks might not care but the core of the Internet has been crumbling for a while now.  The basic problem is that the ratio of network speed at the edge compared to network speed at the core has been growing far too fast, until now it’s basically the same:  10 Gigabit/s is the most common high-speed interface at the edge of the network (to aggregate the traffic from a bunch of servers, for example) and 10 Gigabit/s is also the fastest speed available in the core.

Until now.  Comcast and Cisco recently announced a succesful trial of 100 Gigabit/s router interfaces.  Comcast has been working on the 100GE stuff for a while, but it was my understanding that they were previously using Nortel gear, which handles transmission but not routing.  With this new announcement, it sounds like Comcast will be able to carry 100 Gb/s over a wavelength on fiber that was previously only able to carry 10 Gb/s.  That’s a huge difference and should ease some of the networks’ growth pains.

At NANOG, the networking conference whose program committee i chair, we have seen a medium-sized handful of presentations about 100 Gigabit standardization over the past year, many of them given by Greg Hankins of Force10 Networks.  The take-away messages from all of those talks has been:  standardization sucks, the IEEE is very bureaucratic and 100GE was taking much longer than it should.  Greg took a lot of heat for presenting this stuff, but that was mostly a case of blaming the messenger.

It has been nice, over the past six months or so, to hear about larger networks rolling out pre-standards 100 GE interfaces and putting some pressure on the standards organizations to finally finish up their work.