Fiber Distributed Data Interface
standard for data transmission in a local area network
Fiber Distributed Data Interface (FDDI) is a standard for data transmission in a local area network.
It uses optical fiber as its standard underlying physical medium.
It was also later specified to use copper cable, in which case it may be called CDDI (Copper Distributed Data Interface), standardized as TP-PMD (Twisted-Pair Physical Medium-Dependent), also referred to as TP-DDI (Twisted-Pair Distributed Data Interface).
FDDI was effectively made obsolete in local networks by Fast Ethernet which offered the same 100 Mbit/s speeds, but at a much lower cost and, from 1998 on, by Gigabit Ethernet due to its speed, even lower cost, and ubiquity.
Description
FDDI provides a 100 Mbit/s optical standard for data transmission in local area network that can extend in length up to 200 kilometers (120 mi). Although FDDI logical topology is a ring-based token network, it did not use the IEEE 802.5 Token Ring protocol as its basis; instead, its protocol was derived from the IEEE 802.4 token bus timed token protocol. In addition to covering large geographical areas, FDDI local area networks can support thousands of users. FDDI offers both a Dual-Attached Station (DAS), counter-rotating token ring topology and a Single-Attached Station (SAS), token bus passing ring topology.
FDDI, as a product of American National Standards Institute X3T9.5 (now X3T12), conforms to the Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) model of functional layering using other protocols. The standards process started in the mid 1980s.
“Fiber Distributed Data Interface” enters the record as standard for data transmission in a local area network. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Fiber, Distributed and Data can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 23, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q181382. The Library of Congress control number is sh91001213. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1998.
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This entry incorporates text from “Fiber Distributed Data Interface” 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.