18 June 2002 -- The 10 Gigabit Ethernet Alliance (10GEA) has announced that, after three years' work and vendor collaboration, the final milestone in the IEEE standards approval process was reached last week.
The IEEE 802.3ae specification for 10 Gigabit Ethernet was unanimously approved by the IEEE Standards Association (IEEE-SA) Standards Board during its meeting on 11-13 June in Piscataway, NJ, USA. This followed a review by its Standards Review Committee (RevCom).
"With the ratification of the IEEE 802.3ae specification enterprises can now confidently deploy 10 Gigabit Ethernet in their corporate backbones, data centers and server farms to support mission-critical applications. Service providers and carriers can take advantage of Ethernet's cost effectiveness and deliver metro Ethernet services over SONET/SDH, dark fibre, or DWDM wavelengths," says Bruce Tolley, 10GEA VP and senior product line manager, Emerging Technologies, Cisco Systems.
"On behalf of 802.3 I would also like to acknowledge the members of the 10 Gigabit Ethernet Alliance for their support of and contributions to the IEEE 802.3ae standard, " said Bob Grow, chair of IEEE 802.3 Working Group, former chair of the 10GEA, and principal architect in Intel Communications Group's CTO Office.
Public multi-vendor interoperability demonstrations were hosted by the 10 Gigabit Ethernet Alliance at SuperComm in Atlanta, GA, USA on 4-6 June and NetWorld+Interop in Las Vegas in May. Companies involved include: Agilent Technologies Inc, Blaze Network Products, Cable Design Technologies (CDT), Cisco Systems, Corning Inc, Enterasys Networks, Extreme Networks, Force10 Networks Inc, Foundry Networks Inc, Hitachi Cable Ltd, Infineon Technologies Corp, Intel Corp, Ixia, JDS Uniphase, Marvell Semiconductor Inc, Mindspeed, Molex Inc, Nortel Networks, OFS, Optillion, PMC-Sierra, Primarion, Quake Technologies Inc, Spirent Communications, and Velio Communications Inc. The 10 Gigabit Ethernet Alliance was founded by: 3Com, Cisco Systems, Extreme Networks, Intel Corp, Nortel Networks, Sun Microsystems, and World Wide Packets.
Positioned as a high-speed, unifying technology for networking applications in LANs, MANs, and WANs, 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10GbE) will provide simple, high bandwidth at relatively low cost. In LAN applications, 10GbE will enable organisations to scale their packet-based Ethernet networks from 10 to 10,000Mbit/s. In MAN and WAN applications, 10GbE will enable service providers and others to create extremely high-speed longer-distance Ethernet links at very competitive cost.