Ever feel the exhilaration of sitting in a race car and going around the track at super high speeds? We came close to that experience when we recently received early editions of a vendor’s 100GE cards for their routers. The experience so far has been phenomenal – no issues in getting the card up and running, the optics work great and packets are getting forwarded at line-rate. We are putting those cards through our rigorous testing process, though our lips are sealed for now.

For the industry, this is significant progress – just last year we started the Advanced Networking Initiative (ANI) project and the prospects of actually seeing a 100GE interface in a router this soon seemed far off. So kudos to the vendor (you know who you are) and to the IEEE 802.3ba 40/100Gbps task force – if you are listening, this stuff is ready to go!