The Optical Internetworking Forum (OIF) announced two new Physical and Link Layer Working Group (PLL WG) projects:
- a Common Electrical Interface (CEI) 25 project, which will address electrical interfaces of 20 to 25+ Gbps for both chip-to-chip and backplane applications. The published CEI Implementation Agreement (IA) enables backplane interfaces to operate up to 11 Gbps. This is the first step in addressing the Ultra High Bandwidth requirements presented by the OIF¹s Physical Layer User Group at the Forum¹s third quarter meeting in July 2005.
- an implementation agreement targeting 120 km reach lengths utilizing alternate signaling transmitter technology. This effort extends the work the OIF completed earlier this year in the published "Interoperability for Long Reach and Extended Reach 10 Gbps Transponders and Transceivers" document. The new implementation agreement will support ITU-T Study Group 15 work on future application codes. This technology will allow carriers the ability to leverage/extend the lifecycle of existing fiber and provide support for
bandwidth-intensive applications such as video.
In addition, the OIF Board announced the following election results:
- Joe Berthold (Ciena) was re-elected president;
- Monica Lazer (AT&T) was re-elected to the board and named the
treasurer/secretary - John McDonough (Cisco Systems) was re-named vice-president
- Steve Joiner (Finisar) was re-named vice president of marketing
- Hans-Martin Foisel (Deutsche Telekom) and Stephen Shew (Nortel) were newly elected to the Board of Directors.
