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The Ethernet Alliance has showcased the interoperability of Power-over-Ethernet (PoE) products at an event held earlier this year.
The plugfest meeting, where vendors came together to test the performance of their solution, took place at the University of New Hampshire InterOperability Laboratory (UNH-IOL) in Durham, New Hampshire and saw PoE devices from the likes of HP, Texas Instruments and Brocade tested.
It found there was 100 per cent interoperability for the technology, which bodes well for the development of new standards in the future and the continued success of PoE devices.
John D'Ambrosia, chair of the Ethernet Alliance, and senior principal engineer at Huawei, said: "The plugfest showed that there is clearly market enthusiasm for standards-based PoE interoperability ... The impressive results from this plugfest are in line with what industry requires and expects from a standards-based solution."
He added that as an organisation aiming to facilitate collaboration within the industry, 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 event attracted a wide range of equipment and technology vendors, which tested their devices in accordance with two previously released IEEE 802.3 PoE specifications, IEEE 802.3af and IEEE 802.3at, against a variety of scenarios, including increased stress conditions.
All of the product combinations were proven to be able to work together over the worst-case Cat5e cabling. What's more, all devices involved in the tests were shown to pass 99 per cent of test cases related to standards conformance.
David Tremblay, member of the Ethernet Alliance and system architect for Hewlett Packard Enterprise company Aruba, said PoE is playing a key role in supporting technology such as IP telephony and wireless access. In the coming years, he added it will help "accelerate a host of emerging application spaces".
"The Ethernet Alliance 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," he continued.
The Ethernet Alliance consortium includes system and component vendors, academics, government professionals and industry experts to help expand Ethernet technology. It helps take Ethernet standards to market through activities ranging from the incubation of new Ethernet technologies to interoperability demonstrations and education, such as the recent plugfest.
