"We all need fatter pipes, but there are other ways of moving forward if the speeds come at the cost of too much power consumption, physical complexity and cost of ownership," said Bikash Koley of Google in a talk to a group of more than 100 developers hosted by the Ethernet Alliance.

New networking systems should target delivering ten times more bandwidth with no more than four times more power consumption, he said. In addition, vendors need to understand separate optimizations needed for networking within and between large data centers, he added.

The Google talk stood in contrast to a separate presentation from a Facebook network engineer who called for starting a terabit Ethernet standards effort as soon as possible.

The meeting gathered many of the networking developers working on the IEEE 802.3ba standard for 40/100G Ethernet. The group debated next steps including whether to aim at a next-generation of 400G or terabit Ethernet.