Last week I wrote about five new speeds that the Ethernet Alliance (the marketing arm of IEEE) are working on. The lower speeds 2.5 Gbps and 5 Gbps are called MGBASE-T and according to this post from the Ethernet Alliance, the MGBASE-T Alliance is overseeing the development of these standards outside of IEEE. This week, news broke out about leading PHY vendor Aquantia teaming up with Cisco, Freescale, and Xilinx to form the NBASE-T Alliance. This raises some questions about the work and causes that the MGBASE-T Alliance and NBASE-T Alliance are committed to.

Both NBASE-T and MGBASE-T are trademarks of Aquantia. Both the MGBASE-T Alliance and the NBASE-T Alliance are Delaware corporations. It appears as though the MGBASE-T Alliance was formed around June 2014, while NBASE-T Alliance is newer, September 2014.

The NBASE-T Alliance website defines the technology as follows:

NBASE-T™  is a proven technology boosting the speed of twisted pair copper cabling up to 100 meters in length well beyond the designed limits of 1 Gbps.

Capable of reaching 2.5 and 5 Gigabits per second over 100m of Cat 5e cable, the disruptive NBASE-T solution allows a new type of signaling over twisted-pair cabling. Should the silicon have the capability, auto-negotiation can allow the NBASE-T solution to accurately select the best speed: 100 Megabit Ethernet (100MbE), 1 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE), 2.5 Gigabit Ethernet (2.5GbE) and 5 Gigabit Ethernet (5GbE).

So what happens to MGBASE-T given that Aquantia was a part of both? My hunch is that it fizzles away and the other vendors who were working on it (no names here) lost in the race to Cisco, Freescale, and Xilinx.