Gigabit Ethernet charter confirmed; standards due

Electronic News, July 21, 1997 by Bernard McAleer

Cupertino, Calif.--The charter of the 15-member Gigabit Ethernet Consortium of companies was confirmed at its founding earlier this month as part of a cooperative agreement of vendors to establish a forum for testing Gigabit Ethernet products for both interoperability and conformance against a number of test suites. The target date for the suites to be ready for implementation is late summer. The Gigabit Ethernet Alliance also announced at the recent plenary meeting in Maui, Hawaii, that the IEEE 802.3 Working Group approved the issuance of a Working Group Ballot (EN, May 26) for draft 802.3z/D3.1. This signalled the 802.3z draft's final definition and feature set stability. Additional progress was made in the 802.3ab Task Force meeting.

"What this means is that the draft is complete in specifications," said Bob Grow, vice chair and technical liaison for the consortium, and VP of industry relations for XLNT. "There are no holes of things yet to be specified. A number of comments will come in during the technical standard. And the standard is expected to have approval in March of 1998."

The charter details a four-step process: to provide the facilities, services and procedures that will allow a quantitative assessment of a device or a component's ability to participate properly in multivendor Gigabit Ethernet networks; to develop and disseminate technical information relative to implementation and use of Gigabit Ethernet technology; to investigate interoperability issues related to Gigabit Ethernet and to provide a forum for their discussion; and to contribute to the IEEE 802.3z standards development activities by providing comments which will facilitate conformance testing and enhance interoperability. The idea for a test consortium, originating in April and May of this year when a Gigabit Ethernet Alliance task force was formed to assess the need for interoperability testing, resulted in its creation in affiliation with and located at the Interoperability Lab (IOL) at the University of New Hampshire.

Members of the consortium, such as 3Com, will provide technical personnel and equipment resources to build the framework necessary to deliver fully interoperable Gigabit Ethernet products, which it expects to bolster user confidence. "Primarily, our goal is to ensure interoperability, but also internetworking between 10-megabit, 100-megabit and Gigabit Ethernet systems will be a critical component as they interface with legacy systems," said Mark Fishburn, VP of marketing at Netcom Systems, who, as leader of a Gigabit Ethernet alliance testing subtaskforce, is working with the IOL to define the test suites. "To drive that work, there will be ancillary equipment from other technologies, both local and wide-area-networks, that we envisage we'll probably be involved with in due course." The consortium elected a steering committee to ensure that it fulfills its charter, although it will have a largely passive role, said Mr. Fishburn. The following representatives were elected to the committee: Mr. Fishburn, Bob Grow of XLNT, and Colin Mick of Packet Engines.

Companies are moving quickly to use the standard. Beginning in the 3Q97, 3Com plans to deliver a full enterprise Gigabit Ethernet system--based on 3Com's Gigabit Etherlink PCI network interface card, SuperStack II boundary switches and CoreBuilder high-function switches--that enables scalable networks ranging from 10-to-100-to-1,000Mbits per second. These five new products will enable a high-performance server, wiring closet and backbone connectivity, and will also ease migration by supporting shared and switched Ethernet, Fast Ethernet, FDDI, Gigabit Ethernet and asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) within a single network and within a single switch. The 802.3z/D3.0 draft was published and distributed to the full membership of the IEEE 802.3 Working Group on June 23 for review before the early July plenary meetings, when the IEEE 802.3z Task Force addressed comments generated on draft 802.3/D3.0 to produce draft D3.1 in preparation for the 802.3 Working Group Ballot. As part of the ballot process, the Gigabit Ethernet Alliance Technical Committee expects to receive comments, but the last technical changes are targeted to be resolved by interim meetings of the IEEE 802.3z Task Force, to be held in London in early September and in Silicon Valley in late September. The IEEE 802 Sponsor Ballot is tentatively set for December, with ratification of the 802.3z standard targeted for the end of 1Q98. Concurrently, the 802.3ab Task Force, chartered with the development of the 802.3ab standard for a 100-meter Category 5 unshielded twisted pair physical interface, made progress in the areas of line code selection and cabling, of which three line-code proposals were selected for final evaluation. Existing EIA/TIA-568-A-compliant cabling should meet the new test measures. Current plans call for the IEEE 802.3ab Task Force approval to follow the Working Group Ballot in March 1998 and completion in late 1998.