The 100 Gigabit Ethernet (100 GbE) standard was finalized in June of 2010 as IEEE 802.3ba and now the technology is moving into the implementation phase.
As to why carriers are choosing to deploy 100 GbE, it’s often a question of the management cost of link aggregation complexity. Many carriers today have link aggregation strategies for the 10 Gigabit Ethernet links.
“Most customers will need to make a decision of continuing to go down the path of 10 gig link aggregation to address bandwidth needs, versus jumping over to 100 gig,” Ken Cheng, vice president, Service Provider Products at Brocade told InternetNews.com. “There are pros and cons to both approaches.”
Going a step further and looking at vendor implementations, there is also disagreement between Cisco and Juniper over the interoperability of 100 GbE solutions.
