Ethernet Technology Consortium 800GbE – The organization formerly known as the 25 Gigabit Ethernet Consortium recently announced the 800 GbE specification, alongside a name change to Ethernet Technology Consortium. The group’s work on the new specification paves the way for a wave of new devices on the enterprise side today, and the consumer end in the future.
Standards are usually formed by tech communities to give direction to the engineers who make our electronic devices and ensure compatibility.
The goal with any technological advancement is to make something repeatable so that it can be used in the widest variety of projects without either engineers or eventual consumers having to sacrifice as part of the adoption process.
It’s a complicated-sounding concept but a good way to illustrate it is with USB. USB is a standard for the specifications of the connector type we all know and use daily. The practice of building a standard around USB is the reason why any manufacturer can make a USB cable and we know exactly which devices it will be compatible with.
When it comes to internet data transfers, Ethernet standards dictate, among other things, how data is transferred between Ethernet cables. The construction of those cables – whether they’re made of fiber optic wires, whether wires are arranged in a twisted pair, and so on – plays a crucial role in dictating how much data can be pushed through.
Back when they were calling themselves the 25 Gigabit Ethernet Consortium, the goal was to make devices that could manage a data rate of 25 gigabits per second. With the announcement of the 800GbE specification from the Ethernet Technology Consortium, we can now anticipate devices capable of pushing 800 Gbps, doubling the previous milestone from last year.
What 800GbE Means For The Internet
The data transfer rates implied by this new standard dwarf anything we’ve seen for home internet usage to the point of comedy. For some perspective, 5G connections at maximum are projected to reach something like 10 Gbps, which would be hundreds of times faster than most US internet providers’ fastest speeds.
RELATED: CATEGORY 6 AUGMENTED FOR NEW NETWORKS
But 800GbE isn’t for residential internet. The goal of the new specification is to increase the bandwidth of remote web servers. The places we access daily for our internet will eventually adopt this standard, thereby improving their speeds by at least double (more if they didn’t upgrade to 400GbE).
This will allow for dramatically more data to be pushed through data centers, decreasing latency, and making the entire internet faster as adoption spreads.
Compared to the 400GbE specification announced in 2019, 800GbE means twice the bandwidth. Architecturally speaking, 800GbE is basically the same configuration as 400, but with double the lanes. That may seem lazy but the advantage is this means data centers won’t have to completely alter their port setup to support 800GbE, making the transition less daunting.
Adding double the performance without increasing physical space is essential today, as smaller, more concentrated data centers become increasingly popular to support smart cities and the internet of things. So while 800GbE adoption will almost certainly cost more money, the technology is more efficient, more convenient, and future proof.
Advancements in cloud AI, machine learning, and deep learning, combined with a gradual shift on the consumer end toward remote storage and streaming technology is putting a sizable strain on data centers. Before the announcement of the 400GbE standard, data center storage requirements were seeing an increase of about 50% year-over-year.
The public’s reliance on high-speed data transfers, as we continue to use the internet for much more than simply loading up web pages, will only grow from here, and data centers need the capacity to keep up.
800GbE sounds a little bit like overkill right now, but raising that ceiling will likely mean web developers and engineers can set ambitious new goals for the internet as a platform.
