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Colleagues:
IEEE 802.3 will meet November 10-13 at the Hyatt Regency Albuquerque in Albuquerque, NM, USA. The meeting announcement is linked from our home web page (www.ieee802.org/3). Rooms are sold out at the Hyatt, but the meeting announcement has information on alternate hotels. These alternate room blocks will be released October 10. Independent of hotel reservations, attendees must register for the meeting. Web registration for the meeting in now available, you can save some money by pre-registering.
The November opening 802.3 meeting will begin at 1:00 pm on November 10, and the closing 802.3 meeting will be 1:00 pm November 13. These meetings will follow our typical agenda. (For typical ordering of topics, please see the minutes from the July meeting. A detailed agenda will be provided at the meeting.) As usual, task force, study group, standing committee and any appropriate ad hoc meetings will be scheduled between the opening and closing 802.3 meetings.
An overview of the week’s activities follows. Please note that there will be three calls for interest (the first step in initiating a new 802.3 standards project). In addition, please note the exceptional scope for the November Maintenance meeting.
If perhaps you were planning on adding a family trip to the March plenary meeting, please be aware that the meeting hotel for the March 2004 plenary went out of business. While we may be meeting at a different hotel in the Orlando area, there is no guarantee. This should be resolved by the November meeting.
It will be a busy week, and I look forward to seeing you in November.
Bob Grow Chair, IEEE 802.3 Working Group bob.grow@ieee.org
TASK FORCE / STUDY GROUP MEETINGS
802.3ah Task Force – Ethernet in the First Mile (Tue-Thu) The EFM Task Force agreed to significant revisions to its draft during its interim meeting. The task force is currently conducting a recirculation working group ballot on P802.3ah/D2.1. The November task force meetings will resolve comments from that ballot and produce appropriate modifications to the draft. It is anticipated that an additional WG recirculation ballot will be required after the November meeting. It is also expected the Task Force will request conditional approval for progression of the project to Sponsor Ballot before the March plenary meeting.
In anticipation of progression to Sponsor ballot, an invitation to ballot will soon be issued by IEEE-SA. If you wish to participate in the Sponsor ballot, please make sure you join the 802.3 ballot pool and are qualified to participate (http://standards.ieee.org/db/balloting/ballotform.html).
802.3ak Task Force – 10GBASE-CX4 (if required, Thu morn) The 10GBASE-CX4 Task Force will be conducting a recirculation sponsor ballot on P802.3ak/D5.2. The 10GBASE-CX4 TF met Oct 14-15 in Ottawa to address comments from D5.1 recirculation ballot. The task force will meet, if necessary, during the November plenary meeting to address comments from that second recirculation ballot. (If there are no comments, no meeting will be held).
10GBASE-T Study Group (Tue-Thu) The primary objective at this meeting is to get approval from 802.3 and the LMSC Executive Committee for a PAR and Five Criteria. Task force meetings will also include relevant technical presentations and discussion. In addition, the 10GBASE-T Study Group will be presenting an 802 tutorial (tentatively 6:30 pm Monday night).
Rules, Interpretations (tentative, Wed morning) The standing committees on Rules and Interpretations will meet. At the date of this announcement, one interpretation request has been received.
Maintenance (tentative, Wed afternoon) The November Maintenance Task Force meeting will be much more than the typical processing of maintenance requests. A recent change in IEEE policies requires revision of any standard with four approved amendments. When P802.3ak is approved, we will therefore be required to revise our base standard (802.3ae, 802.3af and 802.3aj are approved amendments). When P802.3ah is approved, the standard will grow to a difficult to manage ~2500 pages.
Proposals will be discussed on how the document might be restructured to simplify maintenance and to better accommodate the continued growth of Ethernet into new market segments. Alternatives range from no significant change to the current standard structure to splitting the base standard into multiple standards. Decisions in November will determine PARs submitted for revision/maintenance for March approval.
PROJECT AUTHORIZATION REQUESTS
802.3 PARs
One 802.3 PAR will be considered. It has been pre-submitted to the LMSC Executive Committee. The draft PAR is available in the 10GBASE-T subsection of our web site (http://www.ieee802.org/3/10GBT). If approved, this PAR will likely be numbered 802.3al. The proposed project is to develop a 10 Gigabit Ethernet PHY for operation over twisted pair cabling.
A second PAR will also be discussed in the maintenance meeting on revision of IEEE Std 802.3. It is anticipated that, 802.3, EC and Standards Board PAR approval will be sought in March.
PARs from other IEEE 802 groups
802.1 – Key Agreement: http://www.ieee802.org/1/files/public/docs2003/MACKeyPar02.rtf
ECSG – 802 Handoff: http://www.ieee802.org/secmail/msg04305.html
CALLS FOR INTEREST (tentative Tuesday evening)
CFI #1: 10Gbps on FDDI-grade MM fiber Bruce Tolley, Cisco (btolley@cisco.com)
CFI #2: Backplane Ethernet Bob Grow, Intel (bob.grow@intel.com) The relentless progress in silicon technology enables greater concentration of functionality in smaller spaces. What previously was an equipment rack filled with multiple chassis is with increasing frequency being collapsed into a single chassis. This is occurring in both telecommunications and data processing. Ethernet should be the ubiquitous interface for interconnection of equipment whether distributed over large geographic areas, within an enterprise, within a data center, or between blades across a backplane. IEEE 802.3 is currently addressing all of these interconnections except that over a backplane. Without an 802.3 standard, the number of incompatible standards and proprietary interfaces will multiply. An 802.3 standard for backplane Ethernet will be applicable to blade servers, telecommunications equipment and many other functions that will be collapsed into a single chassis.
CFI #3: 2.5 Gb/s Kevin Brown, Broadcom (kbrown@broadcom.com) The worldwide cable installed base is estimated to be nearly 900M nodes by the end of 2005, over 95% of which is expected to be Category 5/5e/6 UTP cable. There is currently no project in 802.3, which offers speeds greater than 1000Mb/s to this growing installed base of 100m structured horizontal ISO/IEC 11802 UTP. A 2.5Gb/s standard would be the only solution with greater speeds than 1000Mb/s that addresses the full population of installed, and forecast to be installed, cable base. Presentations made to the 10GBase-T study group have shown that 2.5Gb/s is feasible on this cable plant at costs fractionally more than 1000Base-T, enabling usage in servers, workstations, desktop PCs, wiring closet and desktop switches. Additionally fiber-optic transceivers are available that work at 3.125Gbps in support of an 8B/10B encoded version of 2.5Gbps over MMF or SMF cable. 2.5Gbps SerDes will be able to re-use existing I/O Cells and SerDes blocks from XAUI implementations. This is a call for interest to form a study group to explore MAC, PHY, layer management, and auto-negotiation specifications in order to define operation at 2.5Gb/s.
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