Ethernet's future: How fast is fast enough?

Your PC may not need a faster network, but overall data usage on the Web is doubling every year. The big question: Can the venerable Ethernet standard handle a terabit per second?

An IEEE report found that network data capacities continue to roughly double each year, meaning that customers will need 1-terabit-per-second connections by 2015 and 10Tbps by 2020.

(Credit: IEEE)

Slow network speeds got you down? On Monday, computing experts will announce they're tackling the next speed bump for the venerable Ethernet standard.

But don't expect to find the new speed option on your next computer's feature list. The standard, to be produced by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), will likely reach data-transfer speeds between 400 gigabits per second and 1 terabit per second. For comparison, that latter speed would be enough to copy 20 full-length Blu-ray movies in a second.

In contrast, your laptop today probably maxes out at a mere 100 megabits per second -- maybe a full gigabit per second. And that's assuming your laptop even has an Ethernet port in the first place -- MacBook Airs don't, and the trend seems likely to spread as thin laptops catch on.

Many people probably don't even know how fast their Ethernet connections are, because the real bottleneck these days for most users is their broadband connection to the Internet, not the Ethernet connection that can links personal computer to the local network at home or work.

But a faster Ethernet standard still matters to ordinary people. The companies at the other end of the Internet connection -- the Facebooks, the Googles, the telecommunications and financial services firms -- are experiencing unrelenting growth in network capacity needs. And if they can't expand economically or add new features, the Internet either slows down, gets less useful or entertaining, or gets more expensive to use.