10GBase-T Ethernet revs up at Interop

5/14/2011 2:52 PM EDT

Everything in the electronics world keeps getting faster and cheaper with higher capacity in less space. It's great to be a part of progress.

5/14/2011 4:18 PM EDT

Marvell purchase of the Solarflare 10GBase-T PHY is an interesting manouvre competing for share with PLX and Broadcomm. Would like to know the size of the purchase, any pointers to whether and where it was disclosed?

5/15/2011 3:38 AM EDT

Does anyone think of a platform where all the different speed of Ethernet can be merged with affordability. In today's market there are many nonstandard products are available but if some standard platform comes that will really help using the all the different speeds of the Ethernet with affordability.

5/19/2011 2:42 PM EDT

The question for me is whether they can get 10 Gbps on Cat6 or Cat5e cabling, or if it will require something better. If the cables in the walls need to be replaced I would just as soon put fiber in rather than copper at this point to get the additional headroom.

Larry M.

5/20/2011 1:54 PM EDT

Larry and deleste, I am also wondering how 10Gbit per second could be possible on copper cable. Thinking about the signal integrity fundamental I see a great amount of challenge for achieving 10Gbits/sec over twisted paired copper wires. Even though the signal is differential, the lengths of the wires should be precisely equal. I am interested to know if there was any special kind of Twisted-paired cables were used in the demonstrations quoted in this article. Also can this work for 100 mtrs.?

5/23/2011 2:40 PM EDT

Sanjib, Larry, 10GbE is not only possible over twisted pair but Cat 6A cabling is being installed today. Cat 6A cabling is provided by multiple suppliers and meets the industry spec of 100m for 10Gb. Existing Cat 6 cabling can handle 10G but only up to 30m. Cat 6A cabling is different than Cat 6 with the focus being on optimizing alien crosstalk and IL. Cat 6A is still substantially less expensive than fiber so is still what you would want to use for "in the walls" applications.

5/30/2011 8:38 PM EDT

@Rick Merritt: thanks again for your insights.

The 10Gig Base-T party has been in the making for a long time. The cable infrastructure was ahead of the Silicon in this case and many data centers future-proofed by going for this. So the active equipment (switches, servers & routers)

@Sanjib.Acharya: the TIA 568 standard (& the IEEE 802.3) for twisted pair limits the reach to 100m. The 300m demo by PLX/Teranetics is actually a repeater solution -the voltage drop is prohibitive for edge-connected PoE-powered devices like Video surveillance cameras otherwise. PLX used two repeaters with their TN8022 transceivers with an overall power consumption in the link (@PHY only) of about 16Watts. Now put this in perspective with the total power you can transmit with PoE+ now at 25.5W (some claim higher), I don't see how you can power a camera WITHOUT intermediate power injection thru a midspan PSE!

See my comments here on this topic:

http://www.eetimes.com/electronics-news/4216222/PLX-chip-carries-10GBase-T-300-meters?cid=NL_EETimesDaily

The burning problem for 10Gig still is the power consumption when compared to their 1000BaseT cousins. The other issue is the common mode interference from outside sources in case of unshielded twisted pair!

Dr. MP Divakar

5/30/2011 8:42 PM EDT

SORRY! I left one sentence incomplete above, here is take 2:

The 10Gig Base-T party has been in the making for a long time. The cable infrastructure was ahead of the Silicon in this case and many data centers future-proofed by going for this. So the active equipment (switches, servers & routers) makers were waiting patiently for the likes of SolarFlare, Teranetics, Aquantia, etc., to improve their Silicon so the power consumption could come down from a whopping 9W to now a days 4W approx (Teranetics chip).

6/16/2011 5:33 AM EDT

@MP I thought the burning problem was that it's still a middle switching solution without layer 2 broadcast.