Event
Summary
Las Vegas-(Business Wire)-May 9th, 2000, The 10 Gigabit Alliance is growing
by hops and nodes. The vendor alliance formed by seven companies to establish
and promote the IEEE 802.3ae Gigabit Ethernet Standard has grown to over
50 vendors in just three months.
The
rapid and tremendous growth in the 10 Gigabit Alliance will only help
the aggressive timeline that the Alliance adopted in January 2000 to have
the standard in place and ratified by March 2001. Along with the aggressive
timeline, the Alliance is looking to endorse this standard not only for
Local Area Networks, but to include Metropolitan (MAN) and Wide Area Networks
(WAN) as part of IEEE 802.3ae.
Market
Impact
The 10 Gigabit Alliance was designed to have a standard that integrates
all networking technologies under one Ethernet standard for LANs, MANs,
and WANs. This merging of technologies will create robust networks that
will be able to leverage existing Ethernet technologies. LAN Managers
will be able to leverage their existing networking infrastructure while
increasing network performance.
Internet
Services Providers (ISP) and Network Service Providers (NSP) are watching
the development of this standard very closely, because MANs and WANs are
being incorporated into this standard. By being included in IEEE 802.3ae,
ISPs will be able to offer high bandwidth applications between Competitive
Local Exchange Carriers (CLEC) at a relatively low cost.
User
Recommendations
As bandwidth increases and applications expand, one will be delighted
to know that a standard will drive everything in the same direction. The
10 Gigabit Alliance's undertaking is focused on having total support and
implementation of IEEE 802.3ae the 10 Gigabit Ethernet standard by March
2001.
Vendors
such as Cisco, Extreme, and Foundry have already targeted the fourth quarter
of 2000 to start delivering 10 Gigabit products to their customers. Standardized
or not the user community is not concerned that the first generation of
Gigabit products will not be based on a ratified IEEE 802.3ae, because
they know that the ratification process will be completed in March 2001.