Ethernet has been the mainstay of much of the networking environment for almost 50 years now, but that doesn't mean that it's remained unchanged over that period. The evolution of this technology has featured continual increases in the scale of Ethernet networks, increasing in capacity, reach and connections. I’d like to report on a couple of Ether-related presentations that took place at the recent NANOG 92 meeting, held in Toronto in October 2024 that described some recent developments in Ethernet.
The original 1982 10Mbps Ethernet is a distant memory these days. A little over a decade later we saw a 100Mbs standard, and five years after that, in 1999, there was Gigabit Ethernet (1GbE). 10GbE followed after a further five years, and 100GbE in 2010. 400GbE was defined in 2017.
Much of this has occurred by realising the potential from increasing gate density on silicon chips. Aggregate Switching capacity has increased by a factor of 16 in the past decade, from 3.2Tbps to 51.2Tbps. This has been accompanied by an increase in the number of ports per device and the individual port capacity. (Figure 1)