Ethernet Alliance applauds UNH-IOL plugfest

Multi-vendor interoperability test praised for showing ‘market enthusiasm’ for standards

The Ethernet Alliance, a global consortium dedicated to the success and advancement of Ethernet technologies, is hailing the first Power-Over-Ethernet (PoE) Plugfest, held in March at the University of New Hampshire’s InterOperability Lab, as a success.

“The plugfest showed that there is clearly market enthusiasm for standards-based PoE interoperability,” said John D’Ambrosia, chair of the Oregon-based alliance and senior principal engineer at Huawei. “As a facilitator of industry collaboration, the Ethernet Alliance was pleased to bring together a wide variety of vendors to test and validate the inherent interoperability designed into IEEE 802.3 PoE specifications. The impressive results from this plugfest are in line with what industry requires and expects from a standards-based solution.”

Held March 25-31 at UNH-IOL’s state-of-the-art lab, the interoperability test event attracted a range of equipment and technology vendors. Their devices were tested in accordance with two previously released IEEE 802.3 PoE specifications, IEEE 802.3af™1 and IEEE 802.3at™2, against a variety of scenarios, including increased stress conditions.

“PoE has played a key role in supporting wireless access and Internet Protocol telephony, and the technology stands to accelerate a host of emerging application spaces,” said David Tremblay, system architect for Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company and a member of the Ethernet Alliance. He added that the Plugfest offered a valuable, multi-vendor environment in which our members could perform in-depth industry interoperability testing with the goal of boosting end-user confidence around PoE deployment.”

Meanwhile, the alliance, along with the Nbase-T Alliance, will be holding a collaborative plugfest event during the week of Oct. 10 at the UNH-IOL.

The October event is designed to accelerate mainstream deployment of 2.5Gbase-T and 5Gbase-T Ethernet. This technology multiplies network throughput of the more than 70 billion meters of Cat5e and Cat6 cabling sold throughout the last 13 years.