Speed race: Just as 400Gb Ethernet gear rolls out, an 800GbE spec is revealed

Just as the stage is set for 400G Ethernet (GbE) to roll out in force later this year, mainly in hyperscaler, telco and large data-center networks, there is a call to boost that speed to 800GbE or even higher in the coming years. The need for increased speed in data centers and cloud services speeds is driven by many things including the continued growth of hyperscale networks from players like Google, Amazon and Facebook, but also the more distributed and mobile workloads modern networks support.