The Next 40 Years for Ethernet
April 3, 2013, Ethernet Technology Summit, Santa Clara, CA—Jane Li from Huawei projected the possibilities for Ethernet in the next 40 years. She offered a range of possibilities and extrapolated from current prospects and possibilities.
Some trends from the present will be factors in future evolution. When Ethernet was developed 40 years ago by Bob Metcalf, it was an ugly beast of a communications system. Steve Jobs pushed it as a panacea in 1983, and it took off from there. Now, it has merged information and communications and affects the enterprise, cloud, mobile carriers, and other infrastructure.
So in 40 years, we might see much faster speeds in the data center, 1 Pb/s in 2053. At the same time, we should see wireless getting to 5Gbps in the next 10 years, and approaching 50Tbps in 2053. Video will be the biggest driver for speed for the next 20 years as people work to mix illusion and reality into video overlays to your life.
Other drivers will be big data and more sensors that will increase data volumes. At the Tbps rates, we will need to run all the data on light, and the challenge is to find materials that will work at those rates. Silicon and copper will hit walls at 40Gbps, so we will have to have switches in processors and SDN to reduce data movements.
Carriers and data centers will merge, changing the technologies in both, and requiring new business models. The cloud and data centers will consolidate, and the cloud will be another utility grid.
After 2033, we will be in the Tb era, and super computers running at Pflops will be on any desktop. Virtual presence will allow the 10B people on the planet to interact. While we look at the technologies, the model we have to consider is the human brain. The brain has 10B neurons, 100T connections, and operates on 12W. The brain is a complete infrastructure.
The early work in brain implants for prosthetics control will improve with connections to the cloud. We will have capabilities like those in Avatar and some projects are already looking at the issues. The big challenge is going to be a brain-brain interface. The Ethernet of 2053 will be open, compatible, and robust, as expected from our current technologies.
