Force10 CEO Outlines Economic Benefits of 10 Gigabit Ethernet

Ten Gigabit Ethernet will help drive economic growth in China over the next decade by enabling new applications that facilitate high-speed voice, video and data interaction, Force10 Networks President and CEO Marc Randall said today in a keynote presentation to the China Metro Networks Elite Summit hosted by China's Ministry of Information Industry. "Metro Ethernet networks enable a new generation of applications including voice, distance learning and interactive project collaboration, but these applications also require an enormous amount of reliable bandwidth," Randall told the audience of industry and government experts as well as principals from all major carriers in China. "Ten Gigabit Ethernet provides the capacity, resiliency and efficiency to transform metro networks into a truly powerful economic tool that lowers operating costs versus previous generation technologies." During the first quarter of 2004, Force10 Networks was the networking industry's leading provider of Layer 3 Ten Gigabit Ethernet ports, according to Dell'Oro Group's most recent Layer 2/Layer 3 Ethernet report. Force10 is driving the adoption of 10 Gigabit Ethernet technology with recent deployments at Tsinghua University, Shenzhen University City, Harbin Institute of Technology and Oriental University City. In these deployments, the Force10 E-Series delivers the reliable and scalable 10 Gigabit Ethernet foundation that campus networks and high performance computing environments demand. "China's economic expansion will increasingly depend on a reliable and wide-spread telecommunications infrastructure to carry voice, video and data between the government, businesses and individuals," Randall said. "The scalability and manageability of 10 Gigabit Ethernet makes it a natural technology to help China keep pace with the growing demand for high-speed communications." The number of Internet subscribers in China is rapidly accelerating, growing from less than 10 million at the start of the decade to nearly 80 million at the end of 2003. According to a recent report from the China Internet Network Information Center, broadband subscribers grew 173 percent last year to more than 17 million. The same report projects more than 54 million broadband subscribers in China by 2007.