Gilder still has Merrill Lynch...
Follow The Light, Says Guru Gilder
(10/04/00, 7:53 a.m. ET) By Ken Schachter, TechWeb Finance
SAN FRANCISCO -- The computer revolution has run out of steam, says George Gilder.
In his book "Telecosm," Gilder declares the computer age over on page one. Next he dismisses technology icons like Microsoft Corp.'s Bill Gates, Apple Computer Inc.'s Steve Jobs, and Intel Corp.'s Andy Grove. The action has passed them by, he says.
So where is today's life-transforming technology?
Look no further, Gilder says, than the all-optical network.
Speaking at Merrill Lynch's Techtopia West conference, Gilder called the architecture underlying the Internet hopelessly inadequate for the demands that will be placed on it.
A packet on the Internet makes about 17 hops between routers, creating delays that average from 260 to 450 milliseconds.
"The delays and latencies pile up," he says, and will only get worse as today's 1.3 billion Web pages mushroom.
Gilder's vision is for a network that is all optical at its core, with optical fiber feeding into dumb, mirrored optical switches.
"It means the whole core of the network is based on mirrors," says Gilder, whose book "Wealth and Poverty" helped pioneer supply-side economics and influenced the Reagan White House.
Further, Gilder believes, the new optical network will give mankind bandwidth to burn.
What will mankind do with all this bandwidth and lightning-fast networks?
3D video may develop, he says, and video teleconferencing "will be the canonical application of this new era."
Will 10G Ethernet arrive any sooner than the 10G FC?
October 02, 2000, Issue: 519
Section: NETWORKINGS
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Whither 10-Gigabit? -- The demand may be there, but a standard is still a few years away
Brian Robinson
The devil may not necessarily be in the details when it comes to finalizing the standard for 10-Gigabit Ethernet. Much of its core content was in fact locked down a few weeks ago, which is no doubt some relief to those vendors that are already racing ahead with plans to introduce related products by year's end. But the work done by an Institute for Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) working group doesn't mean the 10-Gigabit world is upon us either.
User demand for this kind of bandwidth may not surface for at least another two years. And since it will probably take that long until the emerging standard is finalized, service provider skepticism over whether it holds up could also limit rollout. "The 1-Gigabit standard is now rock solid and provides true carrier-class performance," says Stuart Elby, director of the data architecture group at Verizon Inc. (New York). "But the 10-Gigabit standard is still under development and is a long way from there."
Substantial 10-Gigabit revenue is also a long way off. It is expected to reach about $35 million this year and merely double the following year, according to Dataquest Inc. (San Jose, Calif.) The market research firm does project, however, that revenue will climb tenfold in 2002 and eventually move up to $3.6 billion by 2004.
All this may point to scant returns in the short term, thanks to limited end-user demand. However, demand appears to be growing for gigabit bandwidth in the backbone. In fact, Elby believes that there will be a market for standard-compliant product as soon as it's available. He even points to Verizon's track record as proof that demand from the backbone will emerge. His company has provided 10-Megabit and 100-Megabit Ethernet local-area network (LAN) services to drive customers' intranets, and those were extended with 1-Gigabit Ethernet in January. With requests for 1-Gigabit service increasing, Verizon will soon need that faster backbone in order to handle the aggregation of multiple 1-Gigabit pipes, he says.
The IEEE working group overcame a final major obstacle at a meeting in New Orleans last month when it reached consensus on physical media dependent (PMD) interfaces for carrying 10-Gigabit Ethernet over optical fiber. The standard will allow for three single-mode fiber varieties-for transmission over 2 kilometers, 10 kilometers and 40 kilometers-and two at shorter distances, for transmission over a 65-meter "jumper" length of multimode fiber (usually used to connect two different systems) and another for a 300-meter length of installed multimode fiber.
"Coming up with the PMDs has been one of the biggest challenges for us," says Jonathan Thatcher, a principal engineer with World Wide Packets Inc. (Veradale, Wash.) and the chairman of the 802.3ae working group. "Historically, with optical drivers in Ethernet, we've unabashedly plagiarized other technologies, such as FDDI and Fibre Channel. But for 10 Gigabit, we'd have to have used Sonet [Synchronous Optical Network], and we said no to that. So we've had to develop our own technical stuff this time around." If you can't look over someone elses shoulder it should take longer?
The move was taken because Sonet components are expensive and not easily adapted to the LAN space, in which 10 Gigabit will play. Yet because optics are such a critical component in this part of the Ethernet space, the task force felt it needed to craft its own physical layer device specs and not co-opt those of existing standards.
The work to date is complete as far as having all of the major functions or core content identified, which includes the PMDs, along with such things as media access control (MAC), physical coding sublayer, 10-Gigabit media independent, and other optional and network management interfaces. But Thatcher acknowledges that the process is only halfway there and the hard engineering development part is still ahead. Sophisticated design teams could take what's available now and start working on standard-compliant products. "My guess is there are a lot of startups trying to reduce this to code now." Yet, he speculates, it probably won't be until the middle of next year that the standard is sufficiently locked down for most to work with it.
Other issues have to be considered before 10-Gigabit Ethernet can be deployed, says Kamran Sistanizadeh, chief technology officer for Yipes Communications Inc. (San Francisco), a two-year old company that provides companies with LAN-to-LAN or LAN-to-Internet connectivity using Ethernet over optical fiber, up to 1 Gigabit. These include both developing experience with the product and finding ways to get 10-Gigabit traffic in and out of the network switch backplane.
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