tia lets the connector market decide

When millions of dollars and the fates of several companies ride on their actions, can standards bodies reach consensus?

Stephen Hardy Editor in Chief

Last year, the TR-41.8.1 Working Group on Commercial Building Cabling agreed to consider alternatives to the 568SC connector established as part of the tia/eia-568A Commercial Building Telecommunications Cabling Standard. An updated version of the standard, -568B, was in the works, and several vendors had suggested that a new generation of small-form connectors offered significant size, installation, and economic benefits over the SC. One of the group`s co-chairmen drafted a plan last August to investigate these connectors and to determine if a consensus on their value could be reached. The first line of the plan reads, "Past experiences of the TR-41.8.1 committee regarding connector selection indicate that the agenda item on fiber connector selection be handled with significant care and planning."

Oh, how well those past experiences foreshadowed the future. Six months, three formal meetings, hundreds of thousands of dollars in proposal preparation, and several new heads of gray hair later, the working group in essence reaffirmed the supremacy of the SC at the wall outlet and left at least five small-form connectors to fight among themselves for what`s left. Yet what from a distance may appear to be a dispassionate adjudication by ballot among competing technologies actually involved intense politicking, shifting coalitions, backroom wrangling, accusations of improper polling procedures, and plenty of bitterness. In fact, as this story was being written, the Telecommunications Industry Association (tia) was deciding whether to throw out the results of the last poll of the working group`s membership and hold the poll again.

Yet while nearly all of the major players involved had their toes stepped on at one point or another, sources indicate that the process established by TR-41.8.1 last August indeed appeared to be the result of "significant care and planning" and should have resulted in the selection of at least one small-form connector as a candidate for -568B. A look at how the review process unfolded indicates that the millions of dollars at stake in the burgeoning premises market may have had as much to do with the final poll results as the relative merits of the competing connectors.

Riding the roller coaster

The ride up and down the standards roller coaster began last May, when TR-41.8.1 heard a recommendation that it consider the new generation of small-form connectors (see "Connectors evolve for the premises market" on page 39) as part of its work on the -568B standard. The new connectors represent a significant reduction--generally 50%--in size over the SC (see photo). The smaller size would not only lead to either decreasing the size of the wall outlet interface or increasing its connection density, but the small form factor would also enable fiber-based hubs and routers to have the same port density as their copper-based competitors. Thus, said advocates, the adoption of the connectors would help speed the deployment of fiber to the desk by allowing fiber configurations to mimic those of copper.

The working group took up the challenge. At a meeting in Quebec City, QC, Canada, the following August, TR-41.8.1 co-chair John Siemon of The Siemon Co. (Masood Shariff of Lucent Technologies is the other co-chair) presented a three-step plan for the investigation. The first step, to be taken at Quebec City, involved the development of a survey of connector characteristics with weighting criteria, presentations from the proponents of the connectors under evaluation, and identification of areas where more information on each connector would be necessary. The second step would occur the following November in San Antonio, TX. There, each proponent would deliver a second presentation, the committee members would participate in hands-on demonstrations of the connectors, and the survey developed in Quebec City would be conducted and the results from it reviewed. The San Antonio meeting would end with a poll of the committee`s voting members, who would vote that all, some, one, or none of the proposed connectors move to the next round of consideration.

Those connectors that received positive votes from 50% or more of the committee members would move to the next stage, which was to be held in Albuquerque, NM, in February of this year. There, the proponents of the remaining connectors would make final presentations. Then the committee would be polled once again, this time on whether they favored each connector over the 568SC. Those connectors that out-polled the 568SC by two-thirds would then move to the next stage--which was left undetermined.

"The process was only defined up until this two-thirds poll, and then it was left open from there, thinking why spend time on determining how to implement this if we never even get that far?" Siemon explains.

The committee members were willing to cross the implementation bridge when they came to it and accepted the process plan. Five small-form connectors were presented at the Quebec City meeting--the mt-rj, proposed by a team of amp Inc. (Harrisburg, PA), Siecor Corp. (Hickory, NC), Hewlett-Packard Co. (Palo Alto, CA), USConec (Hickory, NC), and Fujikura Ltd. (Tokyo, Japan); the VF-45 from 3M Telecom Systems Div. (Austin, TX); the Optispeed LC from Lucent Technologies (Murray Hill, NJ); Panduit Corp.`s (Orland Park, IL) Fiber-Jack (marketed as the opti-jack); and the scdc/scqc from Siecor, Siemens Corp. (Berlin, Germany), and ibm (Poughkeepsie, NY).

The Quebec City meeting went smoothly, by all accounts. But San Antonio turned into a shoot-out when the committee started taking a hard look at the five offerings. After the presentations and hands-on assessments, the weighted survey was conducted, in which each connector was judged according to 12 criteria. As the table on page 54 indicates, all five connectors performed reasonably well, and only five percentage points separated the top of the list from the bottom.

"When I was at the committee meeting and I talked to people, I myself and a lot of other people assumed that probably three of the connectors would carry on to the February meeting," says Dennis Mazaris, principal of the consulting firm PerfectSite (Sterling, VA), who attended the San Antonio meeting.

Mazaris`s opinion was shared by several of the sources contacted by Lightwave. Thus, the poll results that followed the survey came as a shock to many: The only connector to achieve the necessary 50% approval from the 53 people who participated in the poll was the mt-rj. The outcome represented a marketing coup of major proportions for the mt-rj team--and potential disaster for the companies behind the other four connectors. With visions of being left on the docks as the ship to the multimillion-dollar premises market pulled out of the harbor, representatives from the rejected firms immediately lobbied for rule changes that would open the door to the next stage for additional connectors. According to an article written by Mazaris for Lightwave`s sister publication, Cabling Product News, March 1997, page 16, the wrangling lasted a good hour and a half. Finally, someone suggested that the voting totals be examined in more detail. The results showed that 68% of the members-at-large who participated in the poll approved of the mt-rj, versus the 49% of the next most popular connector. The disparity essentially quelled further discussions of rule changes and left the mt-rj as the standard-bearer for small-form connectors in the final round of polling.

Explanations for the mt-rj`s showing vary depending upon whether you`re asking someone from the connector`s team or a representative from one of the vanquished camps. Certainly the mt-rj topped the survey portion of the procedure, and therefore its passage to the next round probably should have been expected. The surprise, of course, was that it did so alone. So how did a 5% difference from top to bottom on the survey translate into a 19% gap between first and second in the poll? The answer may have less to do with technical considerations than with the desire by the companies backing the different connectors to consolidate their market positions--a desire that may have backfired for some.

"I think what you saw at San Antonio is that there were five groups of companies and five different coalitions there that were determined that `We are only going to vote for ours.` And then you had this group--I`d call them `independent people`--that didn`t have a vested interest in any of the five. And they could have voted for all five if they wanted to," offers Rick Akins, fiber-optic product manager at Panduit Corp., who was part of the company`s TR-41.8.1 efforts. "Going into the meeting, we knew we had 15 votes and possibly more that would only vote for the Fiber-Jack. So when you have companies like Lucent or amp or these very strong companies with their own groups that will only vote for them and then you`re trying to get 50% of the vote, it`s very difficult to do. They tried to overcome that in San Antonio by saying you could vote for more than one, but obviously it didn`t work for four of the five companies."

Siemon has a similar view. "No, I wasn`t that surprised," he says of the San Antonio poll results. "It`s difficult to reach 50% consensus when you have so many different viewpoints. Even though the process was defined to be open--anyone participating in the poll could have voted for all five or none and it was intended to allow for more--there are a lot of different viewpoints and alliances. And to get 50% of the people supporting any one interface I think is a challenge in that group--it`s a big one."

The politicking, of course, could have cut both ways. "There were a lot of polling and voting alliances created prior to those meetings based on campaigning that is done by the connector companies--soliciting support and building alliances with other manufacturers and members of the committee," reports John George, a systimax fiber offer manager in the Network Products Group of Lucent Technologies (Norcross, GA). "And those sorts of activities, which are outside of tia but which affect the outcome of the meetings, may result in polls that show support for a connector that may not actually be the best solution technically for the end-user. It`s based on who puts more effort into the marketing and the solicitations prior to the meeting. The one that happened to win put a huge amount of effort into that activity--into the prior alliance-building and polling."

The missing seven percent

Buoyed by a combination of the popularity of its technology and the unwitting largesse of its competitors (and, perhaps, its own skill at building coalitions), the mt-rj team arrived at Albuquerque like a presidential candidate riding into a national convention on a string of primary victories. One more round of voting and the connector would likely become a technical standard--and while a two-thirds plurality represented a more difficult target than the 50% of the previous round, the connector`s 68% approval tally in the San Antonio poll bode well for the mt-rj`s chances. Conversely, victory for the mt-rj meant big trouble for those competing connector companies looking to grab market share in premises applications.

"It was pretty amazing the amount of momentum we had going in," recalls Todd Hudson, an oem marketing specialist at one of the mt-rj team members, Siecor Corp. (Hickory, NC). "We had lots of companies calling us and wanting to get on the bandwagon. It wasn`t necessarily that they thought we were going to get standardized, but they thought we had, of course, a good chance. So I think it would have been a really big feather to put in our cap. And I think it would have taken at least one or two of the competitive technologies and almost gotten rid of those. So it would have been a significant victory as far as all these connector wars we`ve been going through."

This view of the significance of an mt-rj victory in the polls is common. "It would have been a big thing for amp if they had won that," agrees Bob Jensen of 3M, who is secretary of TR-41.8, the organization just above TR-41.8.1 on the tia ladder, "because they could say that their connector was accepted for [use] throughout the entire premises, whereas the other connectors would not have been able to do anything like that."

Thus, there was a lot at stake as Tony Beam of amp rose before the assembled committee to give the mt-rj`s final presentation. Beam`s address focused on seven areas that had been outlined in San Antonio:

1) performance in the field versus fac-

tory-installed performance,

2) exposure to and opinions from user

member companies--the profes-

sional installers,

3) users` responses to samples,

4) complete patent listing to implement

the connector,

5) a description of the proposed Fiber

Optic Connector Intermateability

Standards (focis) documents

6) tuned versus untuned performance,

7) complete performance results per

-568A, including singlemode and

multimode test conditions.

The ensuing question-and-answer session centered on exactly what the mt-rj team would license to other companies interested in manufacturing the connector should it become standardized. The most contentious issue revolved around termination technology. The mt-rj design does not allow polishing in the field--when it is installed in the field, it must be spliced mechanically onto fiber. Both amp and Siecor have proprietary splicing technologies for use with the connector. It became obvious from the questions being asked that other manufacturers wanted access to those splicing techniques as part of the licensing agreement--and just as obvious that the mt-rj team members didn`t want to provide that access.

Meanwhile, someone in the meeting (no source would reveal whom) began distributing a letter from Allison Telecom germane to the third point listed above. The letter claimed that Allison had not been able to acquire samples from the mt-rj team--which played into the concerns raised by some that the connector technology was too new to carry the weight of being standardized. In hindsight, sources on the mt-rj team saw this letter as dirty pool, particularly since no one from Allison Telecom was present at the meeting and the commercial availability of the connector (or potential lack of availability) was not among the points of evaluation agreed to earlier.

The mt-rj team had expected to be grilled at the meeting. "Based on this particular connector interface being relatively new, we knew that there would be some tough questions about how many have you got out there, what kind of field experience do you have, stuff like that," says Hudson.

Still, the team entered the polling with a fair degree of confidence. "We had been following up with tia member companies and talking to them," Hudson says. "Based on the responses--and we, of course, didn`t catch everyone--things were favorable, but we also knew that it would be close. We knew it wouldn`t be a slam dunk or anything, but we felt pretty good when we went into the meeting."

Thus it was the mt-rj team`s turn to be surprised, for when the poll results were announced the next day, the connector received 59% of the ballots (38 out of 64)--a good showing, but five votes shy of the two-thirds needed to be considered for incorporation into the standard. Again, analysis of the polling differs, depending on the source. For those outside of the mt-rj team, the view is that their arguments against having a single small-form connector as part of a tia standard just made sense.

"I believe it`s the right thing to do," says 3M`s Jensen. "You need to let the marketplace decide. The connectors are just beginning to get out on the marketplace today. The end-users have to become more familiar with them and more comfortable with them."

This degree of user uncertainty has led other standards bodies, such as the atm Forum and the International Electrotechnical Commission (iec), to approve multiple small-form connectors for their applications, according to Lucent`s George. "[In our view,] the outcome was that the tia was following suit with atm, with iec-11801 in opening the standard to multiple connectors. It really will benefit the end-user in the long run, because this is a relatively new technology," he explains. "Therefore, the end-user will have a choice in the interface in the networks. And then, over time, probably a small subset of [interfaces] will become de facto standards. And then maybe at that point it would be wise to standardize on an interface. Because to do otherwise, to specify a specific interface at this time, would short-change the end-user in the long run from the innovation that is going to result from the competition among the various vendors."

Several sources suggest that the tia moved too quickly to evaluate these connectors in the first place. "We did not expect the tia to go through this process this early," says Panduit`s Akins. "We thought it would take a couple of years, and then they would find out [what] the end-users wanted, and then possibly come back and put a small connector in, in place of the SC. Unfortunately, the tia decided to do this up front, before the connectors really had market experience. Being faced with that, we went through and we tried to win the thing--and when we didn`t we supported the idea of having an open standard so that amp and Panduit and Lucent and everyone else could fight it out on an even footing."

Naturally, the notion that companies were fighting to be included in a standard, then battling to prevent such a standard from coming to pass rings a bit disingenuous to the people backing the mt-rj. While granting that the technology was relatively new, particularly compared to the SC (which had been on the market for several years before it became part of tia/eia-568A), Siecor`s Hudson implies there were several factors at work in Albuquerque. "I think people got a little nervous about things," he says in response to the question of the technology`s relative lack of market experience. "Of course, our competitors helped raise that awareness."

Indeed, several sources suggested that having hung separately in San Antonio, the mt-rj`s competitors may have banded together in Albuquerque. "Well, of course, it was a breeding ground for all the competitive groups. We were the only ones left standing at the time, so each of them had their own campaign going to try to get people to reconsider," Hudson says.

Mazaris, who lays the blame for the mt-rj`s missing five votes to "politics," agrees that the mt-rj may have been overwhelmed by competing forces--that being the only connector to survive San Antonio may have been more of a hindrance than a help. "In hindsight, that was more of a critical point to [the mt-rj] than anything else, because I think if they would have carried on and gone on to the meeting with more than just themselves, they would have had a better chance of winning than just going on by themselves," he offers. As things stood, "you`ve got four guys ganging up on you instead of two against three or whatever."

"I`m sure you probably had some of that," admits Akins. "Some of the products are obviously coming out on the market already."

Having determined that something was rotten in the state of New Mexico, amp fired a letter of protest to Dan Bart, vice president of the tia. The letter, a copy of which was obtained by Lightwave, cites eight points that the company felt either unfairly stacked the deck against it or should have mitigated in the mt-rj`s favor, but didn`t. Among several points which attacked the procedure agreed upon in Quebec City, the letter raises such issues as the Allison Telecom document and why there were five members participating in the Albuquerque poll who had not participated in any of the three prior meetings. As previously mentioned, the tia is reviewing the merits of amp`s objections.

Reaching a decision

So where does the standards effort lie now? The 568SC remains the only connector cited in tia/eia-568A--and, unless things change unexpectedly, this will also hold true for -568B, which is scheduled for completion next year. However, that doesn`t leave the small-form connectors out in the cold. Parallel to the connector review process, TR-41.8.1 had begun to consider how to implement a positive small-form connector polling. At nearly the same time as the connector review began, the working group`s Fiber-Optic Task Group had taken up a plan put forward by The Siemon Co. that would have premises fiber-optic connectors be standardized much as their copper competitors are. In other words, a connector would be cited at the wall outlet (for copper, it`s the 8-pin modular jack), and other applications are fair game for whatever connectors meet standard performance and reliability criteria. The task group liked the idea, and recommended it to the working group. Ironically enough, the working group approved of the plan in Albuquerque, just before the connector poll. Thus, had the mt-rj received the necessary two-thirds vote, it likely would have won nothing more than supremacy at the wall outlet. While such stature is by no means insignificant, it likely wouldn`t represent the knock-out blow some of the mt-rj`s opponents might have feared.

Therefore, provided that they gain the necessary focis documentation and meet performance and reliability parameters, it appears likely that any one of the five small-form connectors will become "standards compliant" everywhere except at the wall. "I think the message that was sent out to the marketplace was, `You guys go fight it out and may the best man win,` " says Hudson.

Other people received a different message. "I think it was a black mark on the tia`s record. I don`t know how they can say that they didn`t waste everybody`s time," says Mazaris. "It upset me and I know that it upset a lot of people who were there."

What happened with the small-form connectors signals the start of a new trend, some say. "I think what it shows is that no connector manufacturers are going to agree on anything, so it`s going to change the way the industry does things, not only on the fiber side, but on the copper side as well, " Mazaris predicts.

Whether or not this turns out to be true, the saga of the small-form connector hints that, at the very least, standards bodies will be more hard-pressed than ever to keep commerce out of their deliberations. Money talks--sometimes so loudly that nothing else can be heard. u

Pre-race handicapping

Now that the market for small-form connectors is once again a horse race, who`s the favorite? Dennis Mazaris of cabling consulting firm PerfectSite (Sterling, VA) offers an interesting way for handicappers to formulate their wagers.

"It`s a board race now--who captures the big board guys like the Bays and the Ciscos and the 3Coms," he says. "Who captures that market with their transceiver [takes the lead], because that`s an interface right there."

If Mazaris is correct, the mt-rj is out of the gate quickly. Earlier this year, six companies announced agreement on a small-form-factor for transceivers designed for use in hubs and routers. The new transceivers will measure 0.535 inch wide, which is roughly half the size of standard transceivers.

The six companies are amp Inc. (Harrisburg, PA), Hewlett-Packard Co. (Palo Alto, CA), Lucent Technologies (Murray Hill, NJ), Nortel (Brampton, ON, Canada), Siemens AG-Fiber Optics (Berlin, Germany), and Sumitomo Electric Lightwave Corp. (Research Triangle Park, NC). All but Nortel have announced their choice for connectors. The current score reads mt-rj: 4 and Optispeed LC: 1. Already, hub and router manufacturers such as Cabletron, Cisco Systems, and xlnt have announced their support for the transceivers--and for the mt-rj.

Stumbling at the last poll won`t have much of an effect on the mt-rj`s momentum, according to Jay Garcia, strategic marketing program manager, fiber-optic components, Communication Semiconductor Solutions Div., Hewlett-Packard Co. (Palo Alto, CA). "We`ve had a question on what about this tia [poll]?" he explains. "And if we cite the example of the duplex SC, it`s a good example. The duplex SC was not sanctioned in the tia, from what I`ve heard, [until] roughly two years after it was already accepted in the marketplace as a connector receptacle. So this is a similar situation. The market is going to consume the mt-rj, both in transceivers as well as connecting systems, prior to its being sanctioned in the standards body."

Garcia`s confidence in history is buttressed by his belief that the benefits of the small-form transceiver will prove more compelling than potential worries about the connectors attached to it. "I think there would have been some level of impact, but I think the solution right now speaks for itself," he says. "And for that reason, market acceptance seems to be going quite well. It does require us to clarify the standards issues--and that`s all it is: a clarification. And when we cite the example of the duplex SC, people basically nod their head and remember what occurred then."

"We chose the LC, frankly, because we thought it was the best connector," counters Bill Diamond, marketing director, Lucent Technologies Microelectronics Group (Breinigsville, PA), where Lucent`s efforts on the small-form transceiver reside. "And I think there`s a lot of people who share that view, from the point of view of just pure technology in terms of specifications like insertion loss and repeatability and so forth. We like its size and dimension and mechanical configuration."

Diamond is cognizant of market realities, however. "Having said that, the design of our transceiver is such that if some other connector ends up being `the chosen one,` as it were, we would simply change the termination of our transceiver to incorporate that connector instead," he says. "So we`re not locked in by any means to that choice."

While Garcia doesn`t see a lack of a standard connector as an issue, Diamond`s sources say something else. "In general terms, I think we`re hearing from the market that in order for this transceiver to really take off, there is going to have to be an agreement on the connector type--at least for the datacom community," he explains. "Should the telecom community adopt these devices for use in, say, OC-3 or OC-12 applications, because of the nature of the telecommunications industry they may be happy to have the ability to get one of several types of connectors. But data networking, we feel, will want to standardize on a connector. And the take they have is that they hope that a standard evolves so that there are multiple sources of whichever connector is ultimately chosen."

While the mt-rj appears strong in the new generation of transceivers--and, it appears, among the data communications companies--other connectors have found their own followings. For example, the Fibre Channel Association has selected the Volition VF-45 for its standard, while the Optispeed LC is the choice of the iec 1394B serial interconnect standard for connection of video, visual, and computer devices in residential environments. Meanwhile, the atm Forum is expected to approve four of the five small-form connectors--the mt-rj, LC, opti-jack, and VF-45--for use in Asynchronous Transfer Mode (atm) applications.

With most connectors having at least one standards body behind them, it looks like the connector wars will continue to rage for some time to come.