In late 2000 it was our position that contrary to the conventional wisdom of the day, the OC-768 market would require several years to develop. Here in 2008 it is only now that vendors are achieving even modest volumes. So what does this mean for the 100/40 Gbps Ethernet market today? Is there a real opportunity here any time soon? Should the industry really care? Should we expect to see any significant developments in the next few years that will reflect significant revenue opportunities or will we see a repeat of the slow and somewhat frustrating process that defined OC-768? In this new report CIR address all of these questions as well as providing new analysis and forecasting of the opportunities for lasers, TOSAs, ROSAs, transceivers, multiplexers, cabling, amplifiers, WDM components and many other products that are emerging as the data communications industry gets ready for 100 Gbps and 40 Gbps Ethernets. Both optical networking components and networking silicon will be discussed and in the context of how this market will affect both established vendors and potential new entrants.

This report will explain and quantify the demand for the new Ethernet speeds, covering the needs of large data centers, high-performance computing applications and of a variety of service providers and carriers. It will discuss how the emerging standards for the next wave of high-speed networking standards will both fit in with and replace older standards such as Fibre Channel, InfiniBand and SONET. It will give special attention to the implications of the key standards making efforts at the IEEE and predict what the likely commercial implications will be. It answers such thorny questions: which of the many options defined by the IEEE will actually make it to market? And what will the role of the ITU be in establishing the next wave of standards? The report will also discuss the role that MSAs will have in this new revolution in networking.

The report will contain up-to-date profiles of the latest R&D and product development activity of the leading component and transceiver vendors. It will also include CIR's latest forecasts of port counts for 40 and 100 Gbps Ethernets.