On the road to developing a network that can handle 1Tb (terabit) per second bandwidth, research scientists are developing a 100Gbps Ethernet network at the US Department of Energy (DOE) supercomputer center.
The usual Ethernet network standards and speeds are Fast Ethernet (100Base-T) clocking in at 100 Mbps and Gigabit Ethernet (1000Base-T) clocking in at 1 Gbps. The fastest Ethernet network has been clocked at 40Gbps. This effort to reach 100 Gbps is a a bold effort that could lead to increase bandwidth capability in both research and commercial networks.
The US government is funding the project allocating much of the money from the stimulus package enacted by the Obama Administration earlier this year. This continues the Federal Government's tradition of cultivating and promoting the domestic tech sector and is a nice change from the usual allocation of funds for defense related technologies.
This could lead to super fast networks delivering HD quality streaming video to home computers and televisions in less than a decade. The government has always led the way with network innovations. The Internet itself started life as DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Program Agency), a program launched by the U.S. Department of Defense.
