FDDI AS AN EMERGING STANDARD FOR TELEMETRY SYSTEMS

Abstract

Various high performance fiber optic networks have been in existence and available now for over 10 years. Virtually all of them, until recently, have been designed around the “better idea” of some single company or engineer, and therefore were or became expensive, proprietary systems, with limited support, and limited or no growth potential. Many benefits were still realized by the users in spite of that; primarily in the areas of increased bandwidth, improved security, and the capability to have data transmission over long distances. However, after 5 years of continued development and refinement, the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) X3T9.5 committee has nearly completed acceptance and final approval of the Fiber Data Distributed Interface (FDDI) specifications. The new FDDI standards have already evidenced a tremendous and eager acceptance by the end user community, and are clearly destined to replace Ethernet as the most prevalent network media. FDDI also offers additional benefits specifically of interest to the telemetry market, and therefore represents an ideal Local Area Network (LAN) technology towards which any TM installation should migrate.