What is 10G Optical Fiber? The 10 gigabit Ethernet (10GE or 10GbE or 10 GigE) standard was first published in 2002 as IEEE Std 802.3ae-2002. It defines a version of Ethernet with a nominal data rate of 10 Gbit/s, ten times as fast as gigabit Ethernet. 10 gigabit Ethernet defines only full duplex links which can be connected by switches. Half duplex operation and CSMA/CD (carrier sense multiple access with collision detection) do not exist in 10GbE. The 10 gigabit Ethernet standard encompasses a number of different physical layer (PHY) standards. It remains to be seen which of these PHYs will gain widespread commercial acceptance. However a networking device may support different PHY types by means of pluggable PHY modules and SFP+ is a popular module interface. At the time that the 10 gigabit Ethernet standard was developed, there was much interest in 10GbE as a WAN transport and this led to the introduction of the concept of the WAN PHY for 10GbE. This operates at a slightly