Our old friend, the Ethernet cable
The IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) has recently announced that their looking to create an Ethernet standard regarding data-transfer speeds between 400Gps and 1Tbps. In order to create this standard the IEEE recently formed the "802.3 Industry Connections Higher Speed Ethernet Consensus group" to mull over current trends and future forecasts regarding increased bandwidth speeds including the probability that these speeds will reach 1Tbs by 2015 to 10Tbs by 2020.
Sure 1TBps is faster than 400Gps, but the problem lies in the existing infrastructure and would require modification through bonding multiple connections together in order to gain the additional speeds (anyone remember modem bonding for dial-up?). Using this method would not only mean that each physical connection would need their own individual components, which can be costly to providers who would surely pass along the added costs to the consumers, but could also become a bundled-wire nightmare that could take forever to fix if a problem arose. For example, splicing 25-Gbs connections into 16 would garner a 400Gps connection speed while combining 40 would net you a 1Tbps data transfer speed, and if you doubled that, so data could transfer back and forth at the same speed, would require 80 connections! Now think about the connections themselves; the lines are traditionally made out of copper wire, which is rather thick and difficult to manage (just look at any server center) and would require an overhaul to the infrastructure, or at the very least some heavy-duty reinforcement, to the data-centers themselves (again, costly).
Don’t expect that your next PC will be outfitted with either connection anytime soon as the IEEE is just starting to get the ball rolling on the Ethernet standard. However, super data centers could see one of these upgrades fairly soon which should keep us satisfied with streaming videos until the standard is implemented.
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