Initially an enterprise solution, Ethernet has become the ubiquitous networking connection. It is in the midst of a developmental renaissance never seen before. While It took 35 years to jump from 10 Mb/s to 100 Gb/s with steps in-between at 100 Mb/s, 1 Gb/s, 10 Gb/s, 40 Gb/s, it took the industry only the last five years to introduce 2.5 Gb/s, 5 Gb/s, 25 Gb/s, 50 Gb/s, 200 Gb/s, and 400 Gb/s.
With each speed a host of physical layer specifications were introduced, ranging from cm of copper traces between chips and optical modules, to backplanes, to copper twin-axial cables, to 100m of multi-mode fiber, to hundreds and thousands of km of single-mode fiber.
