Thursday, March 23, 2006

IEEE Publishes Primer On Ethernet In The First Mile

The importance of this standard (IEEE 802.3ah™-2004) has prompted the IEEE to publish a primer on it. This 480-page volume is a comprehensive look at the EFM standard, which makes Ethernet the foundation for broadband subscriber access networks in the critical link between the Internet and users. Click on title link to check it out.

Lucent paying $207M for Riverstone

The battle for riverstone is finally over with Lucent prevailing over Ericsson with a bid of $207 Million.

Tuesday, March 14, 2006

10Gig Ethernet PON Study Group

An update on call for interest meet for 10Gig Ethernet PON at Denver last week (March 7).
Slides presented at this meeting are available at http://www.ieee802.org/3/cfi/0306_1/cfi_0306_1.pdf

An interesting aspect is that feasibility studies for 10 Gig EPON have already been conducted by ETRI and KDDI. Work on the standard is expected to be on only the PHY layer (with MPCP fron the 802.3ah standard remaining unaffected). Thus the expected turnaround time for a standard is much less than the 4 years it took for the 802.3ah standard.

The attendance of the meeting was 163 people representing 31 companies of which 58 volunteered to particicpate and contribute to the study group.

Lucent Announces Further Breakthrough in 100 Gigabit per Second Ethernet-Over-Optical

In a paper presented to the Optical Fiber Communication Conference & Exposition (OFC) in Anaheim last week, Bell Labs announced the first reported optical transport of electronically multiplexed 107 Gigabit per second (Gbps) data. This result represents another significant milestone in the industry's march towards being able to offer transport speeds of 100 Gbps Ethernet data networking in metro area networks.

10-Gbit Ethernet over copper specification advances

The draft standard for 10-Gbit Ethernet over copper moved closer to approval after a meeting of the 802.3an task force. Additional editorial suggestions will be considered at a spring meeting, but editors at the IEEE 802 plenary session on last Thursday (March 9) said that all significant technical issues appear to have been resolved.

Extereme unveils BlackDiamond 12K

Extreme has built the BlackDiamond 12K, a new carrier Ethernet switch designed to deliver data and triple-play services to both business and residential subscribers, support for thousands of users per platform, and provide known QoS.