OFC NFOEC: Metcalfe Urges Audience to Move Away from SONET, Ready for Terabit Ethernet

Bob Metcalfe, the man credited with creating Ethernet, in his OFC NFOEC speech in San Diego on Tuesday said Ethernet will be the winning strategy for service providers now faced with a choice between sticking with SONET or embracing Ethernet. He went on to say that while 40gig gear is now shipping and 100gig will soon follow, terabit Ethernet is not far off.

Emphasizing that Ethernet is the clear choice over SONET, Metcalfe talked about the “Monty Hall paradox,” in which he said that service providers are in the position to choose between three doors, much like the game show host presented to contestants. For service providers, behind two of the doors are SONET and the third is Ethernet, said Metcalfe, who is now the general manager at Polaris Ventures. “One of them is right; two of them are wrong,” he added, at one point referring to SONET as the “booby prize.” Those companies still using SONET, he continued, “need to switch, and by switching, you double your chance of winning.”

Ethernet has a long and celebrated history of turning up the winner vs. other technologies, he said. That includes coming out on top over SCSI, token ring and many other options,
he said, joking that now Ethernet is out to get Fibre Channel, InfiniBand and SONET.

Ethernet is clearly superior to SONET on several fronts, said Metcalfe. It is a firm standard without a lot of options, and options only lead to interoperability problems among different vendors’ gear; it comes in the right increments; it is owned, not open source; and it saw rapid evolution after market engagement. And while SONET gets higher marks for preserving the installed base of equipment, Metcalfe said Ethernet also gets an A in this category. All of this, and the fact that Ethernet works nicely with the layered architecture of the Internet, means Ethernet will be around for some time and deliver much larger bandwidth, Metcalfe said.

“Terabit Ethernet, build it and they will come,” he said, invoking a phrase popular before the Internet bubble burst. “It’s an easy prediction, but when?”

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