Two 10GBASE-T Hopefuls Pass On

Please pause for a moment of silence.  Last month, quietly, the 10GBASE-T vendor community lost two early players.  Both were banking on short-reach 10GBASE-T technology, figuring that patch-cord length solutions would be good enough.  Keyeye Communications closed its doors (http://www.entrepreneur.com/localnews/1610167.html), and Vativ Technologies, which had marketed a proprietary, 10gigabit ethernet patch-cord length connection sold its assets to Entropic Communications for a fraction of the money invested (http://www.primenewswire.com/newsroom/news.html?d=139528).

Both of these teams had star players.  I worked with Hiroshi Takatori, founder of Keyeye, a few years back as a partner in developing HDSL2 transceivers,  and I worked alongside, Mike McConnell, well-known in the Ethernet world, and Albert Vareljian in the IEEE standards.  I’ve had some interaction with Sreen Ragavan’s team from ComCore and National, from which he seeded Vativ, and they are not slouches either.  It is with some sadness that I see these engineers and technology marketers depart from the 10GBASE-T scene. It goes to show, as I’ve said a few times before, 10GBASE-T is an extremely hard problem to solve.  It just took more careful systems planning, intellectual property development, and patience than most will go for.  Both teams made compromises on distance or standards compliance, and attempted to go for less than 100 meter reach, in Vativ’s case, a few meters of patch cord, and in Keyeye’s case, aligned with a “short reach test mode” which was inserted into the 802.3an-2006 10GBASE-T standard as an optional mode to allow full-100m-capable devices to conserve power when they were connected on shorter links.  Relaxing the demands of the technical problem does make 10GBASE-T amenable to analog and other simpler techniques, but it also makes it a lot less useful.

Now that full performance devices have come to market, and it is clear that we have begun dramatically bringing the power down (see http://www.networkworld.com/news/2008/041408-solarflare-halves-10gbase-ts-power.html?code=nlnetarch133353 ), as was done for 1000BASE-T before, I guess that it was hard to generate enough greed in investors to overcome the fear that a short-reach technology would be relegated to a small niche, while traditional, full-100m devices with power management capabilities would once again fill the vast majority of slots.  Fortunately, Solarflare and I began this journey with a team and investors who were in it for the long haul, too.

Still, I wish the teams from Keyeye and Vativ well.  I’m already starting to see them show up in other places, helping contribute to other new technologies.