Low-loss waveguides (to fend off a power crisis in 2018) and radical modulation tricks are on researcher Dan Blumenthal's mind.  Researchers at the Terabit Optical Ethernet Center (TOEC) have made good progress there, as Dan Blumenthal, the center's director, told Light Reading at the OSA Executive Forum Monday

IEEE, the world's largest professional association advancing technology, will now initiate a new study group to explore next-generation 100 Gb/s optical solutions for Ethernet operation. According to the officials from IEEE (News - Alert), the study will be done on new amendment to the IEEE 802.3 Ethernet standard.

Predictions of how soon higher speeds will be needed range from 2013 to 2020, according to John D’Ambrosia, who is chair of the IEEE’s newly announced 802.3 Ethernet Bandwidth Assessment Ad Hoc group, which was created with the goal of determining the needs for next generation of Ethernet standards. Constituencies as diverse as Internet exchange operators, data center owners, content providers and the financial community are taking an interest in standards development efforts, D’Ambrosia told Connected Planet in an interview.

With the ratification of the 803.2ba 40 Gbps and 100 Gbps amendments to the 802.3 standard, the IEEE has put together the framework that vendors and service providers can use to sate consumer and business user demand for higher-rate throughput. The IEEE's efforts weren't done in isolation, however. A collaborative effort between the IEEE P802.3ba 40 Gbps and 100 Gbps Ethernet Task Force and the International Telecommunication Union's Telecommunication Standardization Sector (ITU-T) Study Group 15 ensure the new Ethernet rates can be carried over optical transport networks. For 40 Gbps, the standard established specifications ...

A Heavy Reading survey of 15 packet-optical transport systems (P-OTS) vendors finds support faltering for Provider Backbone Bridging – Traffic Engineering (PBB-TE). "There has been a marked swing among this community of vendors away from PBT/PBB-TE toward pre-standard MPLS-TP," analyst Simon Sherrington writes in the recent Heavy Reading Insider report, "Vendors Bet a Packet on Optical."