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hey, the 11ac wave 2 standardis upon us. that's right! wireless is now goingto be faster than...than the cable! wireless is going to be fasterthan the cable? -yeah. faster than the cable?!oh, man! daggun. that sucks! hey guys, welcome. it's time for techwise tv. i'm robb boyd.-and i'm jimmy ray purser. and today, we're talking aboutsomething called multigig, which sounds a little marketing-ish.-yeah, of course. absolutely.

here is what struck me about thisas we started getting into it, the premise being that we are now literally looking at the very near future--and by very near future, i mean, in other words,in this year-- we are looking at a levelof wireless access that now exceeds the speeds of thecable that connects to the wireless. isn't that crazy? isn't thatthe most absurd thing? it makes no sense,because the whole paradigm is, where do you goif you need bandwidth--

and reliable--where do you go?-find the wire. -find the cable, right? this was a new problem to mewhen we started getting into this, and so i'm curious,from your perspective, is it really a new problem?did you see this coming? does this make sense? are we making something upand then solving the problem? well, not necessarily.it does make a lot of sense because when you lookat where we came from-- let's take a look here at the board--

when you look at wherewe came from and stuff, back in 1997 when the fcc opened upwhat they called the ism band, the unlicensed frequency--said anybody can use that-- the ieee came out--you know what, even before that, ncr and lsi came up and they said, "why we don't we makea wireless technology, we'll call it wavelan, and it's goingto be like 1-meg, 2-meg, and we're going to make itfor cash registers." i never knew that much.-yeah, exactly.

and it evolved into 802.11, and the guy who ran that,vic hayes-- vic hayes is considered the fatherof wireless. so if you ever get a test questionon who's the father of wireless, vic hayes is the guy. he ranthan 802.11 for 10 years, and is really considered the real driver in that. but as we've progressed down to standards and stuff for how this works--you want to get a picture with him? yeah, sorry. -he's a great guy,if you ever see the guy.

but standards started evolving.from 1997 to 1999, we went from 802.11, just having an interest committee, and then right into a. a and b came around obviouslypretty darn close to the same time. is this to scale? i'm looking, because it looks likeyou purposely-- i'm assuming you drew this. -yeah. it looks like your drawing.-yeah, it is. it is. it is. but yeah, it is just for---okay, so a little bit more distance,

1999 to 2003,a good four years. and one of things, here's somethingi want to mention real quick, just an ieee pet peeve of mine, because a lot of peoplecall these things standards-- like a; they'll say, "do you supportthe a standard or the b standard?"-yeah, what's wrong with that? that's not correct.these are amendments. you can always tell in the ieee,amendments are lower-case. the standard is always this,it's 802.11 or whatever it is,

dash, that year.everything else in here is-- so this is a standard and theseare all amendments to that standard. amendments to that standard,right. so yeah, so a lot of peoplewill say "standard", and it's not wrongto say it that way, but just so you know.the more you know-- sounds like a good bar bet. so we moved ten years....-to the next standard. we jumped up to the nextstandard here,

and what this is, this is called a roll up. why are we so hung upon the 11? 11 is the frame type itself. so that didn't change betweenthe standards. so have 802 is 1980. february of 1980 is whenthe communications piece happened. ".1" is lan side,".3" is ethernet, ".5" is token ring, that type of stuff, ".11" is wireless. -so that's nevergoing to change

as long as it's still wireless.-no, it's locked in. and so you actually set,.11 is going to cue in right away, that's always going to be wireless.2007 is the standard. and when you see them rolled uplike this-- this is what's called a roll-up, where they take all these changesthat have happened, all these amendments, and they rollthem up into one master standard, because when you want to progress, everything is based uponthis last roll up.

so the standards were rolled upin 2007. and then in 2009, we came outwith .11n. so look at our distance here.-yeah, this was a long period of time, and now we're starting to compress.-starting to close the gap up. this is where the keyto understanding what m-gig really does here, is that because we're making suchfantastic and fast progress-- you go over here from the thoughtbeing 1-meg, 2-meg, and then down here being 11,and then up to 50,

and then now you're overto 11n, and we're starting to pick upmore speed, more capacity, more ways of multiplexingthat signal out. we get a roll-up standard againin '12, to include all our basic amendmentsto that. this is '13 when the ac standardcame out. -only a year. isn't that amazing?from the roll-up to here, here to here,that was when ac came out, and ac was a massive game-changer.

remember we did fundamentalson that and it was incredible, which won an emmy award?or got nominated, it didn't win. still pretty cool. -details. -yeah.-amendments, standard, emmy. so this came out in '13, which isthe newest and latest and greatest, and then what you're looking atis saying, "wow, man, look at the progress we've madefrom here, and now, what have we gotin the future?" well, in '16, we're expecting ahand aj to come out, and then, actually, even to-- basically,what's going be the replacement

for ac which is ax, four timesthe speed of what we're getting. we are planning for m-gig right nowfor ac, ac wave 2, and then we're thinking in '19, we're thinking of goingfour times this speed. and ac wave 2 is comingwithin the year, from what we can tell. -but lookat how quick the gap is, that's the key, is looked at howcompressed your timeline is getting as we go on. and the advancementsare unbelievable. i mean, you're really--i like to comparewireless to almost like flight.

the wright brothers designed flight, and orville wright watchedthe apollo mission take off. that's incredible! -so he got to seethat level of progress--yeah, from nothing before. -yeah, from nothing. and so you're seeing thishappen right in front of you, which is unbelievable.-so is it correct to say that in the wireless space we areinnovating faster as an industry than we are in the physical,cabled space? -oh, by far. -okay. i mean, i'm just making sure... and thereinlies the challenge, right?

is because one is eclipsingthe other, but the point is wireless never remains wireless throughout the entire chain,it has to hit cable at some point, and if that cable can't keep up,therein lies the problem. then you're wasting money,is what it really amounts to. your people are wanting somethingand you're wasting money. if you can't actually take advantageof that speed, you're throwing money downthe toilet, and that's crazy. and nobody is going to upgradea cable plan

to do some of these speeds,it's going to be crazy. but the reality of it is thatyou don't have to upgrade your cable to take care of this m-gig stuff;keep it in mind though, because around '19, we're lookingat ax, we're wanting to go four timesfaster, and you're going to have to lookat doing the cable plan upgrade. you can't ignore it forever.-it's just the reality of it. but at least it's not tomorrow.-it's not tomorrow. if you're building something new,you better be thinking about it now.

there you go. -excellent.well, we've got a lot of show. we're going to cover this and howto answer that issue. bring up the problem; solve the problem. that's how it works? something like that? -absolutely.-i like that, i like how that works. i like that. okay guys, it's goingto be a very busy show. we've got a couple of key thingsto talk about. specifically, it's multigig. yes,that's what the whole show is about because wireless is indeedgetting faster than cable, and it's happening fasterthan you would think.

to do that, we've gotsome switches. we've got new productsto talk about. we're going to talk with the productmanagers and the engineers that are developing these thingsfor us, but first, we're going to talk abouthow cisco is working to bring an entire group of peopletogether, an entire industry, through an alliance to make sure thatthis stuff is going to work for you with the stuff you already have and with the stuff you're lookingto do in the future

with the cabling that you haveright now, and that is part of our workwith the nbase-t alliance. we've got a surprise guestthat i can't wait to show and bring on to jimmy ray. all of that's coming up next. peter jones! what's up, man?!-jimmy ray, how are you doing, man? holy smokes! what the heckare you doing here?! you asked; of course i came. that was my oscar moment,i was trying to act. hey, man, it's great to have youon the show,

especially to talk about m-gigand basically nbase, that's what we really wantto cover, and you're the chairof the nbase alliance. yeah, i've got it.that's my job at the moment. well, let's go backfrom the beginning then. so does this slide here sum upwhy nbase came into existence? absolutely right. there's a bunchof reasons, but the key one we can see here is basically what's happeningwith wireless, right?

so what you're seeingon this slide is basically the chart of wirelessbandwidth over time. -okay. so you can see it's a nice chart,we've got the max, we've got the low,we've got the mid. this is the important number,this is one gig. so what you can see here is clearlywireless has gone beyond one gig from the ap to the wireless switch,so we've got to solve that problem. so right here, what we're actually covering, and we're seeing this right now because now we're up, going to 50.

okay, alright. was it ac that actuallypushed that a little bit higher? yeah, that's clearlywhat's happening. you'll see this over here whereby you see the trends and where we're moving to.-okay, alright, very good. and this second bulletcatches me too. the ap upgrade cycle is fasterthan switches or cabling? i guess that makes sense.-if you think about it, it's pretty easy to pluga new ap up. replacing a switch is likefive to seven years.

configs and all that crap, yeah.-putting in cable, you want to recable a building? we see like 10-15 year lifetimeon that. yes, cable plants, that's a long time,don't they. that's true. and so the other thingto think about is, if you want to avoid the ethernetbeing the bottleneck, you need to be doing 75%of the radio speed. 75? -yeah, that's about the numbereveryone agrees on. now the solution that nbasehas come up with

is 2.5 to 5-gig over cat 5e?-sure, that's the goal. what determines the speed here? there's a whole lot of reasonsfor that, but those are the speeds that arejust basically really easy to do. so what we're looking at is saying that we're basically taking10gbase-t fi technology, and we're running it at eitherhalf or quarter speed. so this gives us a whole lotof variability, because if you think about10gbase-t,

currently it only runs on cat6a. we need it to run on 5e and 6because that's what's in the walls. so what we're looking at is we wantto basically leave your cable there because that's the thing that's inthe walls you don't want to touch, change your ap, change your switch,get your speed up great. so the whole goal hereis to make sure you can deploy 11ac wave 2 easily and basically support all your new needs for your workspace. i don't know if this might take usinto a completely different area,

but running a 10-gig fiat half or quarter speed, surely that doesn't just solvethat problem. there's got to be some more stuffon the back end as well, right? there's some interesting other problems, because if you think about it, the reason that you can't run10gbase-t on 5e today is that basically the channelisn't that good. and so some of the stuffthat's interesting is to try and make sure that you canrun these signals correctly

without running into too manyerrors, and that's where some of the interesting technology is coming up. okay, very good. good stuff. and this is what you were sayingright now, 5x speeds without replacing any cabling infrastructure. pretty darn impressive improvement.-it's very good. i mean when you're talkingabout return on investment, if you're able to get 5x on anythingyou spent 10 years ago, that's pretty darn good returnon money; i mean, that's good stuff.

yeah, i know; it is really good. and as you see it there, we're supporting the poe standardsas well. -oh, very good. that's definitely into bonus land. so, couple of weeks ago,did a podcast, and i mentioned about doing this show, and quite a few of the comments were,"this is silly! why would i ever go from 1-gigto 2.5 or 5? it makes no sense at all.i'll just jump up to 10." why wouldn't you use 10?

so the basic problem for 10is install-base cabling. if i take a look at the surveys today,it looks like about 75% of the cable will not support 10gbase-tfor 100 meters. so what you're seeing over hereis cat 5e is about 46, cat 6 is about 28. -wow. so if you think about how to dothis deployment, i want to deploy 11acwave 2 aps fast, going and telling people to recablea building, it's a hard role. it's amazing what a stalwartcat 5e is, isn't it?

that has been out for a long,long, long time. the one other pointi want to make is that going into 10gbase-t, a lotof aps can't support that either. if you think about an ap,it's a pretty small device. when i'm ready,got to get in a duct, you don't want more power in that thing than you can avoid. yes, because you've got to worry about shedding all that stuff off later, right? interesting, very, very cool. very cool. okay,and that takes us to nbase.

this is where i really want to dig into, because a lot of this stuff, obviously you can read on data sheetsand other stuff, but it's very rare that you havethe chairman of an alliance committee sitting here right in front of you,or standing in front of you. i feel special now. -well, you should,man! this is pretty cool. and i'm just glad i got to interviewyou, not robb, because robb is usually like, "no,we don't need a goober; we need a real host."

so the nbase alliance itself,founded in october of 2014, by--basically, what we're lookingat here is, these four dudes, these alliance members hereat this cut line, these are the folks that founded it,right? cisco, aquanta?how do you pronounce it? aquantia. -aquantia, okay,freescale and xilinx. these are the peoplewho founded this alliance, and then, of course, more people are joining, that kind of stuff. did everybody come to the consensusat the same time

and say, you know, this is a problem"? i think what's happened is thateveryone--over the last year, it's become blindingly obviousto everyone. and so you can see, we have a goodrepresentative of people across the industry joining--these are not small companies-- and we're getting biggercompanies coming through. so it becomes very clear thatwe have to solve this problem for our customers. and so it's justone of those inflection points where the industry is all deciding,hey, it's time to move."

you're not necessarily a standard, you're more of like the wi-ficonsortium, right? we're similar to that. the basic goalis we're not writing a standard, because that's a job for ieee.-right. so what we do is, we basically agreeon the specification, we'll make sure that we can define interoperability between member companies, and then we'll go and try and buildindustry consensus around our specification.-okay, very interesting.

now, are you guys the only playerdoing something like this? something that has this kind of moneyon the table, there have to be more opinions here. there are other peoplein the same game, and they basically havethe same goals. so as i said earlier, we're getting to this age where once you make the storyand you make it clear-- i mean, if we show that chart aboutthe ap speeds and one gig, everyone goes, "got it." so the speedsof aps and install-base cabling,

once you explain that,the need is clear, so we're not the only peoplein the game. are we going to have vhs and betamax wars here? how is this going to play out for...youknow...me? there are no sure thingsin standards, but what is clear is that we'regetting a very clear message from the industrythat this is something we need to get done fastand clean and soon. how fast? -that gets hairy. -okay. -two years maybe?

really, no kidding? so the real question is when's the last technical change, and for that, we need to buildindustry consensus. that's the way the standards work, because you don't workby asserting "i'm right", you basically get everyone to agree.-that's right. so our goal is to go outand build a viable ecosystem and become the clear leaderin having the right solution. okay, that makes sense. -then the standard will follow through.

now, what would be,as a chairman of nbase, if i'm wanting to think aboutmy company being part of this and maybe saying,"i don't know man", what's your overall objective?-so what we would explain to people is we believe we have the solutionwhich meets the needs of customers, we have a specificationavailable today, we have parts available today, so we believe we have the viablesolution that solves the problem and is available. -okay. -so wewould ask people to join us

and come and basically push our standard forward. and that's the whole objective,that's the vision statement of nbase? yeah. -well, son of a gun. well this is pretty good stuff, and it's certainly going to bereally interesting watching how this stuffshakes out. you guys got a websiteand stuff too that people can go and followthe progress and all this? what, nbase.com?-nbaset.org. oh, nbaset.org; well, that's easy enoughto remember.

okay, well, peter jones;freaking-- this is so freaking cool.it's so great to have someone that's actually right in the forefrontof pushing this standard, so thank you so much, man.i really do appreciate it, man. thanks for your time.-peter jones! hasan, thank you so muchfor joining us. i never get over the excitementof getting to deal with something that feels like it's a disruptionin the market. we're doing something new,we're doing something different,

and it feels like we're onthe front edge of something here, and there is nothing i respect morethan a catalyst switching line, and i would not do it justice to describe exactly what you're in charge of, but you're here because we wantedyou to be able to reflect some of those changes and how they're reflected in multiple families of catalystswitches. is that accurate? absolutely, robb. -tell mewhat are you responsible for? what do you and your team do?

so, basically, i am responsiblefor product management of the catalyst switching portfolio, which is the cat 2k, 3k, 4kand the 6. just those little lines...-keeps me busy. i'd say. yeah, okay. now,when it comes to multigig, which i know is just a factorof what you do, because you're looking at taking-- is it something in every oneof those lines into this new eraof gigabit support?

so multigig is somethingthat we're going to have almost across all the accessproduct lines because that's wherethe technology's relevant. and, as you mentioned, it is oneof the biggest disruptions that is going to happen in accessswitching in probably a decade. and, you know, we started on this journeyabout 2-2.5 years ago when we started looking at what was happening with the proliferationof mobile devices. we talked about the cisco vni data,which talks about how in 2018,

mobile data traffic will be morethan 30 exabytes; massive. so a bandwidth tsunami is coming. there are standardsin the wireless world: 11ac; 11ac wave 2; 11ad; 11ax. these are growing faster than we've ever seen before, and as a standard's body, it feels likewireless is growing faster than even the rest of the industry,but that creates this cascade effect that you guys are workingto address? -absolutely. so the how do we keep upwith it?

we talked about unified accesson your show, and we launched converged access, which talks about how todistribute wireless on the switching infrastructureto massively scale this. but now the next question is,how do you address the bottleneck that we are going to see between the access points and the switches themselves? how do you go move awayfrom 1 gig? how do you move towardsa speed beyond that?

11ac wave 2 is the big applicationfor this, which talks about 6.9 gigsof theoretical bandwidth, 5 gigs of aggregate bandwidth, so, really, the speed betweenthe access point and the switch has to go beyond this one gig. so what goes into makinga decision about how you guysare going to address this? because we have to makeearly decisions-- i mean, you talk about 2.5 years ago,

you have to take a lotinto consideration: you have no small install base, and we're certainly not going to beconceding any install base going forward;if anything, of course, we're all expected to grow that. how do you decide what to doand what not to do? you know, some questions that can come upis like, "look, speed transition: why don't we go to 10-gig? it's an obvious question;the servers have gone there,

and really when we lookedat this problem, we looked at 10-gig as a technology,but we, as you mentioned, we looked at our install base,and we looked at the install base, and mostly, the dominant portionof the wiring is cat 5e or cat 6, which does not support 10-gig. so we wanted to give thisinvestment protection. the second thing is, the bigapplications i talked about are going to be wireless,the access points. most of them are poweredover ethernet.

10-gig and poe don't danceright now. -exactly, so we had to make them dance. so that was the problem thatwe gave to our engineering team, give us a solution which...-here's your constraints, here's where you need to be.-exactly. -okay. go beyond 1 gig -2.5, 5 and even 10, give us support for poe, poe+,universal power over ethernet, make it work on existingcabling infrastructure. we challenged the lawsof physics here,

but the engineering teammade it happen. so tell me from a product support-- paint me a pictureof what are we looking at in terms of new productscoming out to support this, how is it going to work into existing infrastructure for people who have recentlymade investments, what's the plan there? so robb, we refreshed our catalystswitching portfolio in the last 12-18 months, and we havetalked about that on your show,

and we're really building on that.so, firstly, what we are introducing are two skusto the catalyst 3850 family. the great thing about this is, the 3850 has been shippingfor more than 18 months; this new family of m-gig switches isgoing to stack with existing 3850s. so it's the same software,same stacking mechanisms, so everything will work together. secondly, we introduced the 4500and the sup 8-e on your show as well, and we have now introduced support

for converged accesson that platform. and we are introducinga new line card, which is an m-gig line cardfor that platform. again, complete investmentprotection. you don't need to changethe supervisor. just put the line card in, and you will be able to connectas new access points or other 10-gig devicesthat you need to. lastly, we are also introducinga family of compact switches,

and one of the compact switchesis going to have m-gig support. we are seeing a lot of peoplelook at workspace transformation and we see compact switchingplaying a big role in these workspace transformationprojects, and m-gig is going to bea big part of that. well, excellent. excellent. well, hasan, i'm anxious to dive into the details. i can see jimmy ray is getting prepped to want to take back overthe lab area here and get into those detailsso let's move on to that.

hasan, thank you so much.-thank you, robb. sankar, welcome to techwise tv, man!-good to see you, jimmy ray. even better to see you, especially bringing all thiscool-looking gear, man! so you're here to talk to usabout m-gig? yeah, the new cisco multigigtechnology that we have. it sounds a little marketing-ishto me; what the heck is that stuff? the multigig technology is likethe coolest innovation that we have from cisco,

really squarely addressingthe wireless explosion, the bandwidth tsunamithat we've been having. this product line is--the new m-gig technology is going to help our customersto squarely address this. so real quick: m-gig: that's the 2.5and the 5-gig stuff, right? right, and not just that. the m-gig ports are also capableof 10-gig, up to 10 gig speeds. this pretty accessible fi then.okay, so that being the case, what type of cabling are we goingto need to achieve that kind of stuff?

the cabling on the m-gig,we can support the cat 5e cabling, which is predominantly out therein the industry. according to our estimates,over 75% of the cabling out there is estimated to be likethe cat 5e cabling. so there are some deploymentsto the cat 6, and most of the newer deploymentsare cat 6a cables. but if you are looking atthe limitations of these cables, the cat 5e cable is capable of onlysupporting up to 1 gigabit of speed, so if you are looking to leveragethe cat 5e cabling

with any of the technologiesthat are out there in the field, they cannot scale beyond1 gigabit of speed, whereas with the new m-gigtechnology that we have, the same cable can be reusedby deploying this technology. okay, let's introduce everybodyto some new gear here and stuff. you've got my favorite switch here,which is a 4500. you've got some 3800s herefor the stackable side of the house. what are we--what did you bringfor us? new line cards? yes, on the catalyst 4500,what you are seeing

is the supervisor 8-e which is where we introducedthe converged access. what you're seeing, the blue line card out here, is the line card that's capableof supporting the cisco multigig technology. it's the blue under here is what you're actually showing. that's the indicatorthat these are m-gig ports. -yep. and you're carrying that acrossthe entire product line, from the chassis, the stackables,

even the little compact switchesand stuff, these are all carrying that littleblue tag so you know that they are m-gig-ready. -that's right, jimmy ray. then let me ask you this: so now we're looking at this ona 4500. this is a new line card, what kind of restrictions do i haveon supervisors? the m-gig line card can be usedon the supervisor 8-e which is the newer supervisor, and it is also supported,by the way,

on the supervisor 7-eand the 7le, which is predominantly out therein the field. yes, the seven i see all the time.that's great news, that's really good news. so now, then we jump upfrom the 4500 to the 3800 here. obviously this from the back of it,a standard stackable switch, no big surprises here and stuff.but i think the thing that-- while the m-gig stuff is certainlythe flavor of the month, one of the thingsthat also surprised me

is, what have you got over here? so basically, you're looking atthe downlink speeds as they are going beyond1 gigabit of speed. uplinks also--guess what, uplinks are also going to becomemore and more bandwidth-hungry, so for that we're introducingtwo new uplinks here. the first uplink is a 2x40, so this is going to supportthe native qsfp so you can plug every single qsfp

that is out there in the fieldon these switches. even like the bidi stuff thatthey use on the nexus could work? yes, we are planning for supportof that, yes. -what?! son of a gun. okay, and then obviously,these are the 10g. yes, those are 8x10 sfp+ ports. so we have so far supportedeither the four or the two, now we're introducing doublingthe number of uplinks that can be supported on this,up to eight ports of uplinks. that's some good link capacityright there. that's good stuff.

okay, really cool, gosh,with some nice add-ins. so let me ask you this: so when you're looking at the m-gigtype of technology, it's great that we work withthe mixed supervisors here, from the 7 to the 8, but i'm a littleconcerned on a stackable switch like this one and stuff, how doesit work in a mixed stack? does that excludewhat i want to do? do i have to have all m-gig switchesin a stack or can i mix and match? absolutely not, that's the beautyof this solution.

as we're introducing the m-gig,this is like any other 3850 switch. so if you're having an existingstack of 3850 switches, you can operate these,add more to your stack, increase the capacity to introducethe m-gig into your stack, or you could have stand-alonestacks as well. so it's the same software, which is capable of supportingthe m-gig as well. that's very cool. and even when we're looking at some of the power requirementsand stuff,

i'm assuming poe, poe+,also upoe? will that work on the m-gig stuff?-that's right. so every single m-gig port is capableof supporting poe, poe+, upoe. there is 15, 30 or 60 ports.-60 watts, that's some good juice, that's good stuff. that gives thesea little more flexibility, now doesn't it?and the reason for this is because of the ac wave 2, right? that was a real motivator to wantingto come out with something like this. it wasn't like a bridge standard

to make people who couldn't gofrom 1-gig to 10-gig to make it cheaper or something. it was truly- the first thoughtwas for the ac stuff. -that's right. okay, very cool. very cool. it's amazinghow we've advanced in technology that the wired link is now goingto become the bottleneck of the network, isn't it? i mean, how many times do i remember going into an office and saying, "i can't download this videoon wireless; let me find a hard lineand plug it in."

and now it's just the opposite,or will be. -right. very, very cool stuff.very cool stuff. so let me ask you this here: so what changes as far as howi manage this switch? because now i've gotsome different speeds, some different capabilities on here.does my management change at all? or is it just physical layer, soget over it? if you're running your existingsoftware, you just need to upgrade to the nextversion of the software

that is capable of supportingthe m-gig, but it is going to beone single software that you traditionally useon these switches, so there's no changefrom a management standpoint. the standard wireless tools,all that stuff, they're not going to balk and see this speed as an unknown, a baby giant or anything like that?-no. -that's fine, everything's cool. the engineers out herewatching the show, they really want to cut throughall the marketing mess,

find out what they really needto know. what's the real scoop on this?in just a little bit of time, what would you say is the realscoop on m-gig? so, taking it beyond one gigabitof speed on your existing cabling, and not only that--i just also wantedto introduce to you before the newer compact switches. yes, that compact switchis pretty cool. we didn't have enough timeto talk about it because that's a 4500 there,that's good stuff.

yeah, basically, on these switches--\ so you're capable of taking upyour switches on your existing software to speedsbeyond like 1 gig with those speeds, running the same software,so running the same clis and all the command sets,the coolest stuff that you've had on the cisco systemsfor a very long time. very, very cool stuff. well sankar,this is really pretty cool, man. i'm really wanting to take this stuff out and actually plug it intothe techwise rack here

and see what we can do to getsome performance testing done. thanks dude, i really doappreciate it, man. i really like this, this is alright. so here's the question, i was just--we were just talking about i loved listening to youand peter jones just go deep into someof the background, and you get into the physicsthat's involved here. and that's really what i started wondering, which is, as we look at whatwe are now able to do,

as it seems increasing the abilityto get more out of that cat 5e cable and extend the lifeof that cable plant, why can't we continue to do that?what's the limiting factor in just being able to--what do i really need to upgrade it in the next five years? can't i just wait for more technologyto be invented? eventually you bump up to a limit that's controversially calledthe nyquist–shannon theorem. nyquist–shannon theorem?

but it's also called nyquist–shannonand then some russian name, and then a german namebehind that, because it was two guys who came upwith this theorem that basically said that you're takinga discreet operation in space and you are converting itto a numerical sequence, and there is a limit of what you can do when you are actually makingthis conversion process. so you hit a limit of what you can dofrom in space to actuality in practice.

and so you'll bump up against whatwas called basically a shannon limit when it comes to actually pushingthat stuff through the cable. isn't that where it came about,because i think i remember reading what you had told me you wanted to cover on this and this notion of there is somewhatunlimited bandwidth to a certain extent or theoretically based on the ability to do error correction. that's correct, theoretically.-yeah. -right. but it's that true limitthat you begin running into,

and it's a physics principle? yeah. nyquist-shannon.-it's literally what you run into. yes. you can use them in quitea few things but right now it's actually applieda lot more to data communications, but it actually applies to quitea few broadbands. it's a conversion,it's a sampling methodology of actually understandinghow all that stuff works. and that's reallywhat it amounts to. there's a lot, a lot, a lot of stuffto it,

and so i'm really short-changingthe heck out of it right now, but that's really what you're bumping up into. i'll put some links in the shownotes and stuff because there was some interestingreading on that even for someone that doesn'tfully understand it or hadn't studied physicsa great deal. it's really fascinating stuffto actually figure out how you're actually coordinatingall that stuff, these discreet functions in spaceand actually bringing that in.

it's really, really cool stuff.it's very groovy. and it's great for bar bets,as we've had a couple today. great for bar bets. you know mathematica and stuff has operations built into it so you can load it in and send itout, it's pretty cool. so another thing that was mentionedearlier, i think-- i think peter had covered thiswhen you were talking to him about the fact that this is notnecessarily new technology that we hadn't already come upwith before,

there just wasn't reallya market for it because we are-- so what's happenedis that confluence of events where we've now shown that wirelesshas indeed right on that edge, of now it's eclipsing the cable plant,it's going to be left behind if not changed out or brought upwith the new technology that we're now talking aboutwith multigig. so those two have come togetherto solve the problem now, but anybody looking forward,they're building new, they're planning for the next10 years or such--

i mean, you're not putting cat 5ein that stuff, right? if you're going to pull in new cable,you're going more advanced and setting yourself up.-you're at least looking at 7, 6a at a minimum, 7 for sure.that's for certain, absolutely. is it fair to say it's a last gaspfor cat 5e? i'd say that's probablya pretty fair assessment. we're wringing that stuff out?-i really would, yeah. i'm actually surprised they can dowhat they can do right now. it's nice though, right? and i like the fact

that it keeps you from having tochange something out unnecessarily, because that's a huge thingfor a lot of people. to replace a cable plant?oh my gosh, yes, the downtime. you've got to run them in parallel. how long have you had cat 5,in general? i don't even... -it's over 25 yearsor something, isn't it? yeah, at least. it's a long, long time. -good show. yeah, are you kidding? absolutely, fantastic! alright guys, i hopeyou enjoyed it as well.

this was a lot of fun putting it together. we got to meet new people that are actually informing a lot of interesting upcomingepisodes and stuff that we're hopingto get into, stuff happening withinthe bowels of cisco, new alliances that are pushingthe limits of things that you can't even begin to understand--or at least i can't-- about what we have coming up. and so we look forward to sharingmore of that information with you

as we go forward. hey, stay in touch with us. we thank you for watching this one. all our information has beenon the screen, if not already, it is right now. facebook, twitter's probablythe best. let us know what you thinkand what you want to see more of. we sure appreciate you watching.thank you to the crew, thank you to our guests.we'll see you guys on the next one. i always forget what we're doingon this one. -i do too.

i don't know why, it never snuck in.snuck in? sunk in. sunk in. oh, look at you.-look at each other. oh we're doing the wideand then we go- oh, that's right. look, it takes 100 episodesfor anything...