A group of network operators and equipment vendors have agreed to work together to establish a test bed for 100 gigabit-per-second Ethernet technology to help accelerate product development.

Level 3 Communications, Infinera and Juniper Networks, together with the research and education networks Internet2 and ESnet, will collaborate on creating a 100-GbE network on which to test live bandwidth-rich applications and, in the process, fine-tune their own 100-GbE technology.

“We’ve agreed to collaborate together on a multivendor, multi-application environment to roll [100GigE] products out as aggressively as we can,” said Rob Vietske, executive director of network services for Internet2. “We’ve got to define the types of applications that will drive this technology. We’ve got to define what a reasonable test bed is to prove that multivendor environment. Then we’ve got to do the work of actually deploying the test bed and proving out all those concepts.”

The test bed will be created on the Internet2 network, which is built upon capacity leased from Level 3 as well as Infinera DTN optical transport gear and Juniper T1600 core routers. Internet2 also interconnects with ESnet.

The precise physical location of the test bed hasn’t been finalized, but Vietske said one of Internet2’s most “interesting” routes (and thus a likely candidate) is that between New York City and Chicago. Those two sites, with proximity to particle colliders that exchange massive amounts of data, are also landing points for much of Internet2’s international traffic and could well see terabits of traffic per second.

“We’re seeing our researchers – individual researchers – be able to basically fill a 10 GbE link with an individual work station,” Internet2’s Vietske said. “And there are hundreds of [researchers].”

Though some carriers have tested 100-Gb/s optical links, they haven’t done so with Ethernet interfaces. And while 10-Gb/s Ethernet links are used commonly across the industry, 100-GbE links would yield much more efficiency, provided the demand exists to fill those pipes. Using 100 GbE links instead of 10 10-GbE links, vendors say, would milk more capacity per component, providing higher density, lower space usage, greater reliability (with fewer things to fail) and lower power dissipation, for example.

The IEEE is currently working on a 100-GbE standard, 802.3ba, which members hope to complete by mid-2010. And just this week, the Ethernet Alliance and the Road to 100G Alliance announced a merger.

This week at the Supercomputing 08 trade show, Infinera is demonstrating a new 100 GbE “preproduction module” for its DTN optical gear, but the vendor said the collaboration announced today will help it better understand customer needs and thus help it better commercialize the technology.

“The number of bits per second you’re getting over a single wavelength really is not the important thing,” said Drew Perkins, Infinera’s chief technology officer. “The important thing is: What services are you able to deliver over a fiber network? What is the ultimate total capacity you’re able to get across that fiber? And what are the economics of delivering that?”