Definition:

The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Standards Association (IEEE-SA) is an organization within IEEE that develops global standards in a broad range of industries, including: power and energy, biomedical and health care, information technology and robotics, telecommunication and home automation, transportation, nanotechnology, information assurance, and many more.

IEEE-SA has developed standards for over a century, through a program that offers balance, openness, fair procedures, and consensus. Technical experts from all over the world participate in the development of IEEE standards.

The IEEE Designation for the Gigabit Ethernet Is 

The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) designations for Gigabit Ethernet are IEEE 802.3z and IEEE 802.3ab. The reason why there are two standards instead of one is because there were two different groups that developed the Gigabit Ethernet technology. The 802.3z standard came out first in 1998 and the 802.3ab standard came out in 1999. Individual houses and one-building centric businesses are more likely to use the 802.3ab standard.

802.3z is the older of the two technologies. It requires a different type of cable to connect networks than the preceding 100BASE-T technology. The newer cables are made out of copper or fiber. If you were to upgrade a network to 802.3z from 100BASE-T you would need to replace all the existing network cables with new ones.

IEEE 802.3ab's advantage over IEEE 802.3z is that it is able to use the existing CAT5 Ethernet cables used by the preceding 100BASE-T standard instead of requiring new cables. If you were to upgrade from a 100BASE-T network to an 802.3z network you would need to run new wires and recreate the existing network. With 802.3ab you only need to replace the routers, switches, and computer network cards. This can be a much more cost-effective upgrade. The standards disadvantage is that its cables are limited to distances of 100 meters.

Since its inception at Xerox Corporation in the early 1970s, Ethernet has been the dominant networking protocol. Of all current networking protocols, Ethernet has, by far, the highest number of installed ports and provides the greatest cost performance relative to Token Ring, Fiber Distributed Data Interface (FDDI), and Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) for desktop connectivity. Fast Ethernet, which increased Ethernet speed from 10 to 100 megabits per second (Mbps), provided a simple, cost-effective option for backbone and server connectivity.

Conclusion:

IEEE standards are designated by the fittingly named IEEE Standards Association. The purpose of developing technological standards is to make it easier for different devices to be able to work with each other. Common examples of standards are flat head and Phillips head screws. To use the majority of screws, a person only needs two types of screw drivers. If every product that uses screws used a different type of screw it would be exceedingly expensive for a person to have all the equipment needed to work with the screws. The IEEE Standards Association helps groups work with and develop technological standards.

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