All too often, interoperability showcases at communication trade shows tend to be anticlimactic, but this dictum was disproved at June's Supercomm show. Demonstrations at the Metro Ethernet Forum, Ethernet in the First Mile Alliance, MPLS/Frame Relay Alliance and BCD Forum all were so impressive, it was hard to pick out favorite functions or vendors from the mix.

One consortium stood out, however, because of its the increasingly broad and audacious mission. The Optical Internetworking Forum was born with a fairly strict system-level mission of creating open links among routers, optical switches and dense wave-division multiplexers. By 2001, designers at the component level on both the photonics and electronics sides were familiar with OIF standards that defined specs for broadband interconnect.

OIF expanded its mission without engendering ill will because of the practical and nonproprietary way in which it worked. In early 2003, the High Speed Backplane Initiative (HSBI) turned over its work on multigigabit backplanes to OIF. In an era of decreased corporate budgets and consolidated industry consortia, everyone seems to be glad to let OIF take on as wide an interface mandate as it wishes.

OIF presented an expanded mandate at Supercomm for taking on the HSBI work. Its Common Electrical I/O project, part of its Physical and Link Layer Working Group, will define two tiers of electrical specs-one from 4.976 to 6 Gbits/second, the other from 9.95 to 11 Gbits/s-to support short-reach and long-reach links with common signaling.

While the main thrust of the effort is to allow high speeds using common connectors and board materials, it will also address "greenfield" backplanes. Representatives from board, connector and materials companies will consider such issues as connector physical design and printed-wiring board materials in designing optimized 10-Gbit backplanes.

Of course, this raises the same questions of semantics that Bob Metcalfe continues to raise for Ethernet: Should we still call this outfit OIF? How about OEIF? How about Seven-Layer Interfaces in Any Physical Medium Internetworking Forum?

OK, so maybe SLIAPMIF doesn't roll off the tongue.

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