1000baseTX?

sthaug at nethelp.no sthaug at nethelp.no
Sat Mar 5 09:52:12 GMT 2005


> > In man pages, dmesg and ifconfig of FreeBSD5, GbE operation over
> > twisted pair is mostly referred as '1000baseTX'.  I guess most of them
> > should be replaced by '1000baseT'.  1000base"TX" and 1000base"T" are
> > different standard and they are not compatible ("TX" needs CAT6 cable
> > and uses pairs in different way).  Also 1000baseTX support is very
> > rare yet.  I'm sorry I'm not sure if some devices really support "TX".
> 
> Do you have any documentation to back up this claim?

1000baseTX was an attempt at producing less expensive hardware (NICs
etc) that could be used with Cat6 cabling. It is basically dead, and
was never blessed by the IEEE.

The IEEE is quite clear on the fact that Gigabit Ethernet on Cat5 UTP
is called 1000Base-T. See for instance Chapter 34, "Introduction to
1000 Mb/s baseband network", in IEEE 802.3-2002, available from

	http://standards.ieee.org/getieee802/802.3.html

So using 1000baseTX as the name in FreeBSD is clearly wrong.

Steinar Haug, Nethelp consulting, sthaug at nethelp.no


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