Is Gigabit Ethernet the way of the future?

Electronic News, Feb 16, 1998 by Will Wade

San Jose, Calif.--Bernard Daines sees the world of the future wired completely with Gigabit Ethernet cables. And the co-founder, president and CEO of Packet Engines is starting by wiring his firm's hometown of Spokane, Wash.

Packet Engines is currently testing long-distance Gigabit Ethernet connections. So far, the company has tested cables almost eight kilometers long, some four times farther than allowed under most specifications for high-speed Ethernet. "We think it can go further than that," Mr. Daines told a crowd at the Gigabit Ethernet Conference last week. "We think it can go up to 20 or 30 kilometers. We just haven't been able to test anything past eight kilometers yet." The company will officially announce these tests later this month, but Mr. Daines made it clear that he sees this as just the beginning. It is in the process of setting up a city-wide network, and he eventually expects to see a transcontinental, and later a global, LAN wired with multi-Gigabit Ethernet backplanes. "The WAN is going to disappear completely," he predicted. "We will have a world-wide LAN."

Brian MacLeod, director of marketing at Packet Engines, said the old, two-kilometer spec, is a holdover from some of the first Ethernet systems. When the first high speed Fast Ethernet and Gigabit Ethernet designs were implemented, many engineers simply adopted the two-kilometer range automatically. "Most fiber today is better than that, and getting even better," he said, echoing Mr. Daines' prediction of Ethernet connections stretching up to 30 kilometers or beyond. Mr. MacLeod said the company expects to establish a test network with 80 kilometers of Gigabit Ethernet wiring later this quarter. "At that distance, you can start to think about private networks over metropolitan areas," he said.

Packet Engines is currently in partnership discussions with other companies that Mr. MacLeod said have extensive experience in long-distance wiring and obtaining necessary right-of-ways from local and regional governments. This would be necessary to establish a nationwide network of Gigabit Ethernet cables. These companies might include utility companies, wireless providers, or even railroad companies that already have nationwide networks of train tracks with several feet on either side ideal for underground wires. Such an approach has already been used in England, which also has an extensive national railroad network. A national or global LAN is possible, say some other companies, but it may not necessarily be based on Gigabit Ethernet technology. Vernon Little, director of marketing for PMC-Sierra, said that several other technologies such as SONET could offer the same multi-gigabit data rates, and might be easier to implement and be more durable than Gigabit Ethernet.

Mr. Little pointed out that systems like that could never be allowed to come down for even a second, because at multi-gigabit rates, a moment of down-time means that thousands or millions of critical files could be lost. "A global LAN is possible. The problem is not the technology, it's the architecture and the engineering of the systems," he said. "And it probably wouldn't be using Gigabit Ethernet." Mr. MacLeod agrees that long-distance LAN engines need to be durable, but notes that the same critique would apply to whatever technology is driving the network. "People will be very conservative when they start to design these systems, and they will provide redundancy across the critical paths," he said. "They won't install systems unless they work properly. Most of this is based on realistic expectations. We want to show people that this can really be done."