CHICAGO — The IEEE Standards Board this week unanimously approved the 802.3ah standard for "Ethernet in the first mile," the Ethernet in the First Mile Alliance (EFMA) announced at Supercomm this week. The approval came the same week as a final approval of 802.17, the Resilient Packet Ring standard.
An original project authorization request (PAR) was approved in July 2001 for the EFM group to work on three areas: point-to-point copper over existing copper plant at 10-Mbit/sec speeds at distances to 750 meters; point-to-point optical fiber at speeds up to 1 Gbit/sec at distances out to 10 km; and point-to-multipoint fiber at the same speeds and distances (passive, or EPON, implementations).
After the original PAR approval, the task force added higher-layer functions for operations, administration, and maintenance to its task list.
While the IEEE's 802 LAN/MAN group has still hesitated on providing standards for true carrier implementations of Ethernet, 802.3ah provides standards for the last mile from the edge of the public network to the enterprise or home user.
EFMA showed demonstrations of interoperability at Supercomm that included Actelis, Agilent, Cisco, Extreme Networks, Hatteras Networks, and Infineon. The alliance has been working with Metro Ethernet Forum on metropolitan-based Layer 2 and 3 services for Ethernet, and with the MPLS/Frame Relay Alliance on using MPLS on carrier services in conjunction with Ethernet.
