Fibre Broadband internet connectivity is the backbone of modern society. So much of the world relies on the internet for day-to-day activities and business that faster connections are the new norm. The most current iteration in the development of Ethernet technology is 100G or the 100 Gigabit Ethernet.
100G is not just a speed limit but also a standard for port types with various optical and electrical interfaces to support such a large bandwidth, including the number of optical fibre strands per port. Fibre optic cables supporting 100G can be up to 80 km long.
10-gigabit Ethernet has existed since the mid-1990s, whereas announcements for the first generation of 100 gigabit systems only happened in 2011. 100G has been slow to evolve since the analog design problems moving from the current standards to 100G are significant. Juniper and Ciena have deployed 100G hardware, and Gosfield will join that elite team this year.
Smart home devices and smartphones have become ubiquitous. The rate of data creation in the world and your home has skyrocketed over the past decade. 100G is no longer primarily targeted at heavy-duty data centers and big cities. 100G is the most future-ready technology that provides bandwidth for data centers and service providers to perform effortlessly, thus proving highly scalable.
Furthermore, moving from today's 10G, 25G, or 40G standards to 100G has significant advantages for service providers that already have fully provisioned data centers. The capital and operational expenditures of upgrading to 100-gigabit are low because of backward compatibility with slower standards. Gosfield's existing cabling infrastructure will be retooled to support 100G bandwidth.
Moving from 10G to 100G also has significant power-saving benefits. System performance increases as the same power infrastructure can be reworked, hardware replaced, but power and cooling requirements remain or decrease.
While it is unlikely your home internet connection will need to be upgraded to a 100-gigabit plan anytime soon, it doesn't mean that this change won't affect you. Data centers and some service providers are scrambling to equip themselves with faster internet because data consumption by end-users has gone up significantly.
One minute of uncompressed 4K video, playing at a bitrate of 60 Mb/s can be up to 450 MB in size. With the rise of streaming services like Netflix, Disney+, Apple TV, and Amazon Prime offering 4K streaming on-demand, media providers need to process these requests with near-zero latency. The event horizon of online gaming, cloud computing, and smart-home devices into average consumers' lives will illuminate why higher bandwidth is needed today. Your service providers need to be future-ready.
100G's future readiness cannot be understated. As the world becomes increasingly automated and AI systems take over mundane tasks, data analytics increases to train these systems. On the other hand, blockchain technology is carving an important niche in its journey to form an internet-based economy and facilitate true decentralization.
As these two forces combine to shift the paradigm of the world wide web, 100G will be the backbone technology to facilitate them.
