[10GBASE-T] Reflections
Guys,
Nice to hear from a lot of the old crew that created the 1000BASE-T standard. I think that you can all take a bow, judging from what is happening in the market and the remarkable improvements in implementations achieved in three short years. But no good deed goes unpunished, as they say, so you guys earned the job (and created the need for) taking the next step up. Without a doubt, there are big jumps in the performance demanded and we don't have the luxury that 1000BASE-T enjoyed, namely the introduction of coding into the design. That has been done already. This time around, we have to take advantage of the residual capacity of the cabling, which we barely touched.
On the other hand, you will agree that the levels of sophistication in analysis and implementation of DSP based systems has also increased dramatically since 1997, when GigT started in earnest.
While I enjoyed fond memories of your recollections of what we knew (or suspected) then and what we added later when we got smarter, it strikes me that that history is relatively immaterial today. That was then and our current circumstances are quite different. We now need to agree in the study group that it is feasible to do 10Gig on some form of twisted pair cabling at the desired length and go on to form a Task Force to do the hard work of coming to agreement on the precise details of the signaling and channel specifications.
It is clear that the channel specifications as written in 11801 will have to be modified and expanded for our use and installation qualification test parameters will have to be defined. This is more or less what happened for 1000BASE-T and seems to me to be a normal and reasonable step. After all, why should the cabling industry be expected to have already characterized cabling for the use of a standard for which we are still in the Study Group phase? As for installed cabling, we will see whether or how it may be qualified for 10G as part of our effort.
I look forward to our meeting in Dallas and hope that we can get to work on a PAR draft there.
George Eisler