10BROAD36 Knowpia

10BROAD36 is an obsolete computer network standard in the Ethernet family. It was developed during the 1980s and specified in IEEE 802.3b-1985. The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers standards committee IEEE 802 published the standard that was ratified in 1985 as an additional section 11 to the base Ethernet standard.^[1] It was also issued as ISO/IEC 8802-3 in 1989.^[2]

The standard supports 10 Mbit/s Ethernet signals over standard 75 ohm cable television (CATV) cable over a 3600-meter range. 10BROAD36 modulates its data onto a higher frequency carrier signal, much as an audio signal would modulate a carrier signal to be transmitted in a radio station. In telecommunications engineering, this is a broadband signaling technique.^[a] Broadband provides several advantages over the baseband signal used, for instance in 10BASE5. Range is greatly extended (3600 meters, versus 500 meters for 10BASE5), and multiple signals can be carried on the same cable. 10BROAD36 can even share a cable with standard television channels.

Deployment edit

10BROAD36 was less successful than its contemporaries because of the high equipment complexity (and cost) associated with it. The individual stations are much more expensive due to the extra radio frequency circuitry involved; however the primary extra complexity comes from the fact that 10BROAD36 is unidirectional. Signals can only travel one direction along the line, so head-end stations must be present on the line to repeat the signals (ensuring that no packets travel through the line indefinitely) on either another, backwards direction frequency on the same line, or another line entirely. This also increases latency and prevents bidirectional signal flow.

The extra complexity outweighed the advantage of reusability of CATV technology for the intended campus networks and metropolitan area networks. An installer at Boston University using the Ungermann-Bass product noted that no installers understood both the digital and analog aspects of the system.^[3] In wide area networks it was quickly replaced by fiber-optic communication alternatives, such as 100BASE-FX (which provided ten times the data rate). Interest in cable modems was revived for residential Internet access, through later technologies such as Data Over Cable Service Interface Specification (DOCSIS) introduced in the 1990s and is still widely used today.

Notes edit

^ The term broadband has since been applied to describe high-speed Internet access, a different topic.

References edit

^ "802.3b-1985 - Supplement to 802.3: Broadband Medium Attachment Unit and Broadband Medium Specifications, Type 10BROAD36 (Section 11)". IEEE Standards Association. 1985. Archived from the original on February 25, 2012. Retrieved July 12, 2011.
^ "Information processing systems — Local and metropolitan area networks — Part 3: Carrier sense multiple access with collision detection (CSMA/CD) access method and physical layer specifications". Retrieved July 12, 2011.
^ Paula Musich (July 20, 1987). "Broadband user share pains, gains". Network World. pp. 1, 8. Retrieved July 14, 2011. Broadband networks employ frequency-division multiplexing to divide coaxial cable into separate channels, each of which serves as an individual local network.