Not that it’s a huge surprise to anyone, but the next standard speed for Ethernet will be 100Gbps.

That’s the vote from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc. (IEEE) 802.3 Higher Speed Study Group (HSSG), taken during last week’s meetings in Dallas.

It’s a formality, but a necessary one, as a few other options had been mentioned since the HSSG started. (See 100-Gig Ethernet Takes First Step.) “Now we can move foward” with the work of trying to build a standard, says John D’Ambrosia, the Force10 Networks Inc. representative who’s chairing the HSSG effort.

Many discussions pitted the 100Gbps option against the possibility of 40Gbps Ethernet, a speed in step with the OC768 of Sonet/SDH. But that fight didn’t turn out to be serious; rather, a suggestion of 120Gbps was the only realistic competitor, according to D’Ambrosia.

“There was a lot of consensus around the fact that 40 Gbit/s wasn’t the speed to choose, and there was the same amount of consensus around 80Gbps,” he says.

Quite a bit of support has been behind the idea of 100Gbps Ethernet, as shown at a recent Optoelectronics Industry Development Association (OIDA) seminar on the topic. (See 100-GigE Takes Shape.) Moreover, data centers already appear likely to adopt 100Gbps Ethernet as a means of connecting machines in high-density environments.

“It’s unlikely in the longer term that telecom networks wouldn’t gravitate to what’s being used in the data networks,” says Tom Mock, senior vice president of strategic planning for Ciena Corp. (Nasdaq: CIEN - message board).

Of course, 100Gbps got all the good publicity along the way. It’s a nice round number, and companies like Lucent Technologies Inc. (NYSE: LU - message board) have been seeding the news wires with tales of 100Gbps research. (See Lucent Stretches 100-GigE.) Representatives of the numbers 40Gbps, 80Gbps, 120Gbps, and 160Gbps are expected to demand a recount.

— Craig Matsumoto, Senior Editor, Light Reading