IEEE 802.3
collection of standards for wired Ethernet

IEEE 802.3 is a working group and a collection of standards defining the physical layer and data link layer's media access control (MAC) of wired Ethernet. The standards are produced by the working group of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). This set of standards generally applies to local area networks (LANs) and metropolitan area networks. It also has some applications to access networks and wide area network (WAN) applications. The international standard IEEE/ISO/IEC 8802-3-2021 was adopted from 802.3-2018.
Physical connections are made between network nodes and, usually, various network infrastructure devices (hubs, switches, routers) by various types of copper cables or optical fiber.
802.3 standards support the IEEE 802.1 network architecture.
802.3 also defines a LAN medium access control method using carrier-sense multiple access with collision detection (CSMA/CD).
Communication standards
The IEEE 802 Local and Metropolitan Area Networks Committee was formed in 1980 to create a single standard for the lower layers of a local or metropolitan area network. At the time, there were three approaches to local area networking: IBM’s token ring, the DEC-Intel-Xerox Ethernet, and the token bus.
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This entry incorporates text from “IEEE 802.3” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.