Forget Wi-Fi; wired Ethernet to go to 100G

Yeah, yeah, everybody’s blustering on about 802.11n and its potential for 200Mbps speeds, but that’s nothing compared to the gigabit Ethernet on most desktop machines nowadays. And the IEEE is prepared to blow that speed out of the water as they start work on a new, 100Gbps standard for Ethernet.

The goal is to get 100Gbps working for up to 328 feet of multimode fiber, and six miles of fiber optical cable. The implementation will most likely require parallel 10G Ethernet lines over multiple fibers, but this is a speed as of yet unreached by any networking standard. More bandwidth and speed is becoming more and more necessary as the content that people are downloading off the Internet gets more complex.

If HD video content, for example, is ever to be truly efficient , bandwidth speeds will have to be significantly increased. Of course, Wi-Fi still has Ethernet beat on sheer convenience, but its lack of range means it’s still predominantly a “last ten feet” solution. For the foreseeable future, wired is still the way the Internet will be getting to your house.

[via Slashdot ]