Business Communications Review, March 2003, has a good piece on some recent announcements by Foundry. I was most interested in the 10 Gigabit Ethernet product. The backplane of the current Foundry product runs at 8 Gbps. Any traffic needing to cross the backplane won't do it at wire speed. Still, Foundry is out in front of the 10 GigE market with a two port 10 GigE card.

Market numbers were the most interesting part of the article. 5,000 10 GigE ports shipped last year. No wonder the pricing is still so high. This year analysts expect 30,000 ports to ship. In two years, 2005, the numbers is estimated in the range of 300,000 to 350,000 shipped ports rising to 750,000 in 2006.

If these numbers are correct then in the next four years we will see this market expand from a few thousand to well over 1,000,000 ports. It makes me wonder what will happen in 2007?

It's difficult to imagine what we will do with all of that bandwidth. With GigE links in the first mile I'm sure we will find a use for more bandwidth in the core.

That's all for now.......
8:54:59 PM    comment []