The IEEE standards body should encourage users to become morews. involved in standard setting, warned standards committee member Fanny Mlinarsky. She claimed this would help users keep on top of technological changes and help balance the efforts of self-interested vendors.

Mlinarsky, a member of the 802.3ab (Gigabit over copper) standards committee, and VP of engineering for Scope Communications, is concerned that because users don't have easy access to the standard's progress they won't be up to speed with required changes.

"For example, the specification for Category 5 will have to be altered for Gigabit, but the way the IEEE presents its standards information doesn't always alert users to changes like this," she warned.

Mlinarsky said that standards committees are mostly populated by vendors, with a vested interest in how their sales could be affected. Meanwhile users didn't have the resources to attend every meeting.

"If users were able to keep up to speed with every standard's progress online they would be better educated," she said. "They would have a completely different perspective and perhaps vendor delegates would behave better too."

Karen McCabe, the IEEE's manager of business communications for standards activities, admitted that the 802.3ab standard is not being fought out online. However, she claimed that users could easily become involved.

"We have about 200 working groups preparing standards over password-protected internet forums at the moment. Members can access the information whenever they like and they don't have to meet to make progress," she said.

However, 200 working groups is not that many, considering that the IEEE is working on 700 separate standard projects at the moment.

The 802.3ab standard is not due for ratification until the middle of next year.

- See our IEEE Briefing Paper (page 18) for more details.