Equipment Supporting 2.5gbps and 5gbps

Wed Jan 27 21:59:24 UTC 2016

Fortunately the two groups came together in the IEEE, and there are no
competing standards.

IEEE P802.3bz 2.5/5GBASE-T Task Force stared in March 2015:
- 2.5GBASE-T: 4 x 625 Mb/s over 100 m Cat 5e (Class D) or Cat 6 (Class E) unshielded twisted-pair copper cabling
- 5GBASE-T: 4 x 1.250 Gb/s over 100 m Cat 5e (Class D) or Cat 6 (Class E) unshielded twisted-pair copper cabling
- MultiGBASE-T auto-negotiation between 2.5GBASE-T, 5GBASE-T, 10GBASE-T, 25GBASE-T, 40GBASE-T
- Automatic MDI/MDI-X configuration 
- PoE support including IEEE 802.3bt amendment (power over 4 pairs)
- Optional Energy Efficient Ethernet (EEE) support
- Standard expected in September 2016
- Interfaces expected on the market in 2016
- Task Force web page http://www.ieee802.org/3/bz/

You might have seen my Ethernet speeds presentation... the most recent
one is here:
http://ix.br/pttforum/9/slides/ixbr9-ethernet.pdf (December 2015)

It's slightly out of date as the IEEE Interim was just last week.

Greg

-- 
Greg Hankins <ghankins at mindspring.com>

-----Original Message-----
Date: Wed, 27 Jan 2016 21:45:27 +0000
From: A.L.M.Buxey at lboro.ac.uk
To: Justin Krejci <JKrejci at usinternet.com>
Cc: "nanog at nanog.org" <nanog at nanog.org>
Subject: Re: Equipment Supporting 2.5gbps and 5gbps

Hi,
> I've a couple 10 port Cisco switches that support 2.5 and 5gbps over cat5e, just wondering if there are any other vendors out there with offerings that support these newer ethernet speeds. Supporting cat5e for these multi-gig speeds is a real boon in many circumstances given the wide popularity of it in many buildings.
> 
> Does anyone have any experience with or knowledge of other products, switches in particular, supporting 2.5 and 5 gbps?

well, until the standard is ratified, these Multi-Gig offerings are quite proprietary..

there are 2 competing camps....hopefully they will be compatible and not end up like beta/vhs once the dust settles

camp 1 - http://www.nbaset.org/

camp 2 - http://www.mgbasetalliance.org/

look at those vendors..... I think they hope by avoiding IEEE int he early stages and taping silicon they'll 
get the job done quicker - the drive mainly being faster wireless APs and cheaper data centre interconnects...

alan