[802.3_100GNGOPTX] Addressing the SMF Objective this week

["Mark Nowell (mnowell)" <mnowell@xxxxxxxxx>]

802.3bm Task force members,

I wanted to share some thoughts ahead of this week's meeting.

I've been looking at the progress we have been making towards the goal of adopting a baseline proposal to address the SMF objective.  When I look at the past series of straw polls (see attached), my conclusion is that, as a group, we have remained consistent with having 5 options all vying for support and none breaking away.  While a lot of attention has been focused on the relative support levels against each other, it is clear from the polls so far that our group is a long way from seeing any proposal reach the 75% criteria to be adopted as a baseline proposal.

The 75% criteria has been extremely beneficial historically in ensuring that we have market and industry alignment which in turn often drives  a commercially successful  adoption.  The total cost of ownership to everyone in the supply chain around a new standard is high, so we try to limit what gets adopted to what we have confidence in.  The nature of a standard ensures that we plan and expect to build, integrate, ship, operate this solution for many years and generations ahead.

When I apply this criteria, to the SMF objective proposals, I do not see that level of clarity yet.  This gives me two concerns:

First, that the group decides it has to pick one just for the sake of doing something.
Second, the group decides to do nothing and we lose the industry momentum and effort that has been put into developing a optimized solution for 100G SMF.

What I would like to propose, is that if no new substantive information becomes available at this meeting which significantly affects the level of support behind a proposal, that we look at how to continue this effort outside of 802.3bm (given that it is constrained by it's schedule to remain working on this topic).  One option that I would think worth considering is to move the investigation into the 400GE study group just starting.  This is very similar to what we did when the 40G 40km SMF  topic was incorporated into the 802.3bm project.  Undoubtedly, there would be some procedural things we'd need to follow to comply with 802.3 rules but this would provide us a path to continue working on a solution we know the industry wants us to provide.

I do not doubt that we will likely see commercialization happening on some of these current proposals and assume that MSAs or some other mechanism will ensure we have an interoperable solution.  I don't think that should affect what happens in the standard, and if we do end up developing a solution in a subsequent project, then industry adoption will definitely strengthen any proposals.

See you next week.

Mark

Attachment: 802.3bm support trends.pdf
Description: 802.3bm support trends.pdf