The IEEE will not come up with a 100Gbps Ethernet standard until 2010. Experts believe that technical problems and a high cost make it unlikely for the time being that a useful development of the super-fast network technology will appear on the market before that time. It is clear, however, that such an architecture will be optical: ‘Copper may be useful as a medium, but if you stand next to such a cable you give light in the dark’, a specialist from Quake Technologies summarized the problem. To be economically viable, the price per 100Gbps port should drop below $3,000.
The cost of a 10Gbps port is currently around $500, but solutions are underway to reduce that price by a factor of five. to lower and which still works with the existing Cat6 cabling. Even so, equipment that processes 10Gbit per second will probably not become common before 2008. However, a researcher from Force10 Networks thinks that 10Gbps technology will reach its ceiling within three years: “By 2009 a single blade should be able to handle 500Gbps, or it will stop selling.” The researchers agreed that data carriers and other large consumers of information could make good use of the extra speed; in fact, within ten years a 1Tbps standard should be commonplace. The increasing speeds are also less relevant for small business and private use: more than half of all switches sold in 2005 can at most 100Mbps on.