Classic Ethernet is a family of Ethernet standards, which is the first generation of Ethernet standards. In 10BASE-X, the 10 represents its maximum throughput of, BASE indicates its use of baseband transmission, and X indicates the type of medium used. Classic Ethernet includes coax, twisted pair and optical variants. The first Ethernet standard was published in 1983 and classic Ethernet operating at was the dominant form of Ethernet until the first standard for Fast Ethernet was approved in 1995.[1]
| Name | Standard | Status | Media | Connector | Transceiver Module | Reach in m |
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| Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| colspan="11" | ||||||||||
DIX Standard | (CL8) | MAU | 500 | 1 | N/A | 1 | LAN
| |||
ThinNet Cheapernet | (CL10) | 185 | 1 | N/A | 1 | LAN; dominant standard from the mid to late 1980s; electrical bus topology with collision detection; coaxial cable connects machines together, each machine using a T-connector to connect to its NIC. Requires terminators at each end. | ||||
| colspan="11" | ||||||||||
(CL9.9) | MAU | 2 | 1 | 1 | original standard for Ethernet over fiber; uses any optical fiber with up to 4 dB/km attenuation and at least 150 MHz bandwidth; superseded by 10BASE-FL | |||||
(CL15/18) | 2 | 1 | 1 | Nodes | ||||||
(CL15/17) | 2 | 1 | 1 | synchronous inter-repeater connections | ||||||
(CL15/16) | 2 | 1 | 1 | |||||||
10BASE-F, or sometimes 10BASE-FX, is a generic term for the family of 10 Mbit/s Ethernet standards using fiber-optic cable. In 10BASE-F, the 10 represents a maximum throughput of 10 Mbit/s, BASE indicates its use of baseband transmission, and F indicates that it relies on a medium of fiber-optic cable. The technical standard requires two strands of 62.5/125 μm multimode fiber. One strand is used for data transmission while the other is used for reception, making 10BASE-F a full-duplex technology. There are three different variants of 10BASE-F: 10BASE-FL, 10BASE-FB and 10BASE-FP. Of these only 10BASE-FL experienced widespread use.[2] With the introduction of later standards 10 Mbit/s technology has been largely replaced by faster Fast Ethernet, Gigabit Ethernet and 100 Gigabit Ethernet standards.
Fiber-optic inter-repeater link (FOIRL) is a specification of Ethernet over optical fiber. It was specially designed as a back-to-back transport between repeater hubs to decrease latency and collision detection time, thus increasing the possible network radius. It was replaced by 10BASE-FL.
10BASE-FL is the most commonly used 10BASE-F specification of Ethernet over optical fiber. In 10BASE-FL, FL stands for fiber optic link. It replaces the original fiber-optic inter-repeater link (FOIRL) specification, but retains compatibility with FOIRL-based equipment. When mixed with FOIRL equipment, the maximum segment length is limited to FOIRL's 1000 meters.
The 10BASE-FB is a network segment used to bridge Ethernet hubs. Here FB abbreviates FiberBackbone. Due to the synchronous operation of 10BASE-FB, delays normally associated with Ethernet repeaters are reduced, thus allowing segment distances to be extended without compromising the collision detection mechanism. The maximum allowable segment length for 10BASE-FB is 2000 meters. This media system allowed multiple half-duplex Ethernet signal repeaters to be linked in series, exceeding the limit on the total number of repeaters that could be used in a given 10 Mbit/s Ethernet system. 10BASE-FB links were attached to synchronous signaling repeater hubs and used to link the hubs together in a half-duplex repeated backbone system that could span longer distances.
In 10BASE-FP, FP denotes fibre passive. This variant calls for a non-powered optical signal coupler capable of linking up to 33 devices, with each segment being up to 500 m in length. This formed a star network centered on the signal coupler. A LAN implementing this standard was applied as a branch LAN to construct an all-optical fiber hierarchical integrated LAN with a high-speed LAN (FDDI, etc.) as the backbone.[3]