Renaming the WAN PHY
Colleagues:
To follow up on the suggestion made by Jonathan during the New Mexico
plenary, may I be so bold as to suggest that we change the name of the "WAN
PHY" to something very simple like PHY with SONET framer.
We need to get the word WAN out of the name of the PHY
o Most common folk outside the esteemed IEEE process think long distance
when they think WAN and on the basis of Paul Bottorf of Nortel,'s
presentations the initial application of the WAN PHY would be for short
links between collocated equipment often in the same room.
2) There are ways to build MANs/WANs that do not require SONET. For 10GbE
some of these MANs/WANs will use the LAN PHY and a 1550 PMD over dark fiber
or dark wavelengths. The proof point for this is the 1000s of long distance
1310 nm 1550 nm 1000BASE-X GBICs that are being deployed today over dark
fiber. The WAN PHY as stated in the goal does not address the total
possible 10GBE WAN market and confuses people.. This makes it a bad name in
my opinion
I do not think we necessarily need a motion to change the objective, but I
think we need to choose our words carefully when we name the PHY that the
objective signifies.
Bruce
Cisco Systems