What is driving the need for 100G Ethernet? There are many applications where you're seeing the need for 100G emerging. Some examples are Internet exchanges, carriers and high-performance computing. You're also seeing a need when you look at what's happening with personalized content, which includes video delivery such as YouTube, IPTV and HDTV. There's also video on demand. All of this together is driving the need for 100G Ethernet.
Consumers are also contributing to this. For instance, people have digital cameras that churn out large files that they want to share across the Internet. Content-generation capabilities are increasing rapidly at both the professional and consumer level. This is creating a basic ecosystem problem -- people are sharing content at a higher level, and all of that has to feed into today's pipes.
Is there enough bandwidth today to meet the needs of businesses, content providers and consumers? You do have 10G Ethernet already, and if you use link aggregation -- which allows you to pool your 10G links to create a bigger pipe -- you can go higher. But bandwidth needs are quickly surpassing these bandwidth limits.
When we did an analysis to check the viability of a 100G Ethernet standard, we found that the top supercomputers could already use that much bandwidth today.
However, these standards are not something you whip out in 18 months. Right now we're trying to define what will be in the 100G project. That's a time-consuming process -- you have to create baseline proposals, develop the spec and get comments. We have to go through the document and make sure we got everything right.