The Ethernet Technology Consortium has revealed 800 Gigabit Ethernet

The 25 Gigabit Ethernet Consortium has rebranded itself. The market already has 25Gb, 50Gb and 100Gb Ethernet connections, completing the consortium’s organisational mandate. Now, the consortium has rebranded itself to become the Ethernet Technology Consortium (ETC), and the group is already eying up faster Ethernet standards. 

As of now, the consortium is aiming to bring 800Gb Ethernet to market, leveraging the existing IP for 400Gb Ethernet as a baseline for faster connectivity, aiming to deliver data across eight parallel 106Gb/s physical lanes, enabling insane levels of data transfer potential. 

The ETC currently has over 45 members, including Broadcom, Cisco, Google, and Microsoft. 800Gb Ethernet, in basic terms, offers users two times as many physical lanes as 400Gb Ethernet. 800Gb Ethernet could be considered as a widened 400Gb Ethernet standard, but a lot of work needed to be done to accommodate these extra lanes. What 800Gb Ethernet offers is new connective modifications for Ethernet, delivering compatibility with existing lane specifications while delivering higher maximum speeds. 

ETC’s latest Ethernet standard will move the industry ever closer to Terabit Ethernet, 1,000Gb Ethernet, ushering in a new era of connectivity between systems. This will be a gamechanger for datacenters, where data rates between systems are a key consideration. Thanks to the ETC’s reuse of existing 400Gb Ethernet technology, 800Gb Ethernet should come to market relatively soon, though the technology will undoubtedly come with a high pricing premium. There’s a reason why the consumer space has only started to move away from standard Gigabit Ethernet.