23 February 2017

Overview

In the last few weeks we have seen a major announcement coming out from the IEEE, followed by the supporting marketing hype from certain switch technology vendors, making several very bold claims which border on the irresponsible.

Back in 2013 the IEEE set up a task force under the designation of NGBase-T which set out to investigate getting higher and higher speeds over copper twisted pair cables. The first task was to try and get 40Gb Ethernet over what has become Category 8 cabling. This was given the designation 802.3bq, the background of which was more about the economics of copper vs fibre interfaces in the switch, rather than anything around a performance upgrade.