Cheaper 10 Gig ethernet on the way

A network processor chip could cut the cost of 10 Gig ethernet to as little as US$400 a port, according to semiconductor company Bay Microsystems.

Bay's Chesapeake 40Gbit/s programmable network processor is being built into a range of access, edge, metro and transport equipment.

It is also a step towards 100 Gig ethernet because the chip is scalable and its internal processing engine is already capable of up to 125 Gbit/s.

Testing for 10 Gig ethernet over copper twisted-pair (10GBase-T) is getting easier with the introduction by Fluke of a 10 Gig add-on for its DTX-1800 cable analyser.

Fluke said that its system is capable of measuring and evaluating alien-crosstalk, as well as checking each cable pair individually. Alien crosstalk is a particular problem for 10 Gig ethernet as the transmission speed is high enough for each cable pair to affect all the others in the bundle.