IEEE 10-Gig Standard on Track

NEWPORT BEACH, Calif. –– The 10 Gigabit Ethernet Alliance today announced that the IEEE P802.3ae (10 Gigabit Ethernet) Task Force has completed the first draft of the 10 Gigabit Ethernet specification and has reached agreement on four optical transceivers for multimode and single mode fiber, otherwise known as physical medium dependent (PMD) interfaces. These two milestones were accomplished during last week’s meeting of the IEEE 802.3ae Task Force, held in New Orleans. Based on last week’s accomplishments, the standard process for 10 Gigabit Ethernet remains on track for ratification in early 2002.

"Final resolution of the optical media objectives was an important milestone," commented Jonathan Thatcher, Chair of the IEEE 802.3ae Task Force and Principal Engineer at World Wide Packets. "Two multimode fiber optical transceivers address installed FDDI-grade -- or better -- multimode fiber in enterprise backbone networks, and low-cost connections for data centers and other very short-reach applications. Two single mode fiber optical transceivers address medium and long reach, single mode fiber, metro applications and connections to optical networks."

http://grouper.ieee.org/groups/802/3/ae/index.html