The fast-growing use of mobile devices, fueled by tablets and cloud services, is rapidly increasing traffic on carrier backbones and data-center networks, said industry leaders and observers at the Ethernet Alliance's Technology Exploration Forum in Santa Clara, California.

The traffic is growing so fast that vendors can only stay two or three years ahead of carriers' needs with each new generation of Ethernet, forcing service providers to replace expensive gear more quickly than they want to, said Joel Goergen, a distinguished engineer at Cisco Systems.

To meet the needs of service providers and users 10 to 12 years into the future, the industry needs to dramatically accelerate its technology advancement, Goergen said.

"You need a 100-times jump, but all we can do is two-times or three-times," Goergen said in an interview at the conference.

The problem isn't so much pure technology advancement as the time it takes to reach consensus among vendors, he said. This is despite the fact that the networking industry works together better than most other IT sectors, he added.