Ethernet still rules at 50

1973 was a pretty busy year:  The US Senate Watergate Committee began its work, the first mobile phone call was made in Manhattan, Paul McCartney released the album “Band on the Run” and the Sydney Opera House was officially opened by Queen Elizabeth II, to name but a few key historical events.

But at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, something happened that changed the course of technology and communications even more than that first mobile phone call. Ethernet was born and the rest, as they say, is history. 50 years ago, to be precise!

In 1983, Xerox gave up its trademark and Ethernet became the open standard IEEE 802.3, with its first release capable of speeds up to 10Mbps. It rapidly became THE de facto standard and, as speeds increased and PoE (Power of Ethernet) arrived, it cemented its place for networking. By 1995, 100Mbps was possible, and just four years later the 1Gbps threshold was broken. In 2010, speeds of 40Gbps and then 100Gbps were reached.

At Arelion, we’ve kept pace with and pushed new advances in Ethernet technology. Today we have 100GE ports across our footprint as standard, support 40Gbps Ethernet bandwidth over MPLS, and have also deployed 100Gbps bandwidth Ethernet services over our network, AS1299.

We are constantly upgrading our network and we are closely involved in rigorous trials and testing of coherent technology. In August, we took another landmark step in converging our IP and optical layers as the first global network to deploy Cisco 400G QSFP-DD Bright Optical Modules in our production IP backbone. Today 400GE ports are available to our Ethernet customers that want to future proof their connectivity.”

Routing – the R In Ethernet?

High-capacity Ethernet is one thing, but the way in which the data gets to and across those cables is vital if a low latency quality of service is going to be achieved. One of the ways that Arelion has innovated in this space is with segment routing and Flex-Algo. We have a latency metric for every link in our network that enables us to route traffic based on the lowest latency route achievable. It has also improved redundancy, and we now have a failover time of below 250ms and extremely fast rerouting times. The R may not stand for Routing but, to us, the two go hand in hand.

Ethernet’s next leap at Arelion

We’re continuing to push forward with Ethernet at Arelion with more and more 400G being rolled out across the network. But we are also making changes that bring new services to our Ethernet customers. MPLS VPN technologies such as VPLS have served our customers well, but the need for improved scalability of those VPN networks and faster deployments in the future means offering a different solution. We have now moved on to EVPN configuration across our network and we continue to experiment with it to improve the service offering further, giving customers the best experience. EVPN is also making it faster and more efficient for us to configure our network services.

Bets on the next 50?

Who knows whether Ethernet will still have a role to play on 50 years’ time, but how many technological advances from that period can any of us point to that are still recognisable and in use across the globe every day? Ethernet technology has served our industry and the world well, and still has a great deal to offer. Watch this space.

Tapio Aaltio, Network Specialist