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Did you ever asked your­self, what the heck those NIC descriptions/certificates means:

Intel Pro/100+:
IEEE 802.3, IEEE 802.3U

Intel Pro/1000MT:
IEEE 802.1Q, IEEE 802.3ab, IEEE 802.1p, IEEE 802.3x, IEEE 802.3ad (LACP)

IBM SS/NetXtreme 1000T:
IEEE 802.2, IEEE 802.3, IEEE 802.3U, IEEE 802.3ab, IEEE 802.1p, IEEE 802.3x, IEEE 802.3ad (LACP)

I don’t know what this means, so i checked the http://www.ieee802.org web­site. What is IEEE802:

The IEEE 802 LAN/MAN Stan­dards Com­mit­tee devel­ops Local Area Net­work stan­dards and Met­ro­pol­i­tan Area Net­work stan­dards. The most widely used stan­dards are for the Eth­er­net fam­ily, Token Ring, Wire­less LAN, Bridg­ing and Vir­tual Bridged LANs. An indi­vid­ual Work­ing Group pro­vides the focus for each area.

So this Com­mit­tee devel­ops some stan­dards, lets have a look at the most com­mon standards:

#802.1 Higher Layer LAN Pro­to­cols Work­ing Group
802.1AC — Media Access Con­trol Ser­vice revi­sion
802.1ag — Con­nec­tiv­ity Fault Man­age­ment
802.1ah — Provider Back­bone Bridges
802.1aj — Two-port MAC Relay
802.1ak — Mul­ti­ple Reg­is­tra­tion Pro­to­col
802.1ap — VLAN Bridge MIBs
802.1aq — Short­est Path Bridging

802.1aa — 802.1X Revi­sion
802.1AE — MAC Secu­rity
802.1af — MAC Key Secu­rity
802.1AR — Secure Device Identity

802 — Overview & Archi­tec­ture
802a — Playpen Ether­types
802b — Reg­is­tra­tion of Object Iden­ti­fiers
802.1D (2004) — MAC Bridges
802.1G — Remote MAC bridg­ing
802.1p — Traf­fic Class Expe­dit­ing and
Dynamic Mul­ti­cast Fil­ter­ing
802.1Q — Vir­tual LANs
802.1Q-REV — 802.1Q Revi­sion 2005
802.1s — Mul­ti­ple Span­ning Trees
802.1t — 802.1D Main­te­nance
802.1u — 802.1Q Main­te­nance
802.1v — VLAN Clas­si­fi­ca­tion by Pro­to­col and Port
802.1w — Rapid Recon­fig­u­ra­tion of Span­ning Tree
802.1X — Port Based Net­work Access Con­trol
802.1y — 802.1D Main­te­nance
802.1z — 802.1Q Main­te­nance — with­drawn
802.1AB — Sta­tion and Media Access Con­trol
Con­nec­tiv­ity Dis­cov­ery
802.1ad — Provider Bridges

#802.3 Eth­er­net Work­ing Group
P802.3an, 10GBASE-T Task Force.
P802.3ap, Back­plane Eth­er­net Task Force.
P802.3aq, 10GBASE-LRM Task Force.
P802.3ar, Con­ges­tion Man­age­ment Task Force.
P802.3as, Frame Expan­sion Task Force.
P802.3at, DTE Power Enhance­ments Task Force.
802.3au, DTE Power Iso­la­tion Cor­ri­gen­dum TaskF.

#802.11 Wire­less LAN
#802.15 Wire­less Per­sonal Area Net­work (WPAN)
#802.16 Broad­band Wire­less Access
#802.17 Resilient Packet Ring
#802.18 Radio Reg­u­la­tory TAG
#802.19 Coex­is­tence TAG
#802.20 Mobile Broad­band Wire­less Access (MBWA)
#802.21 Media Inde­pen­dent Hand­off
#802.22 Wire­less Regional Area Networks

and so on… So if you need exactly what you IEEE802.xxxx stan­dard means, check the IEEE802 web­site. There is also a descrip­tion of the stan­dard available.

But atten­tion: for exam­ple the 802.11 IEEE web­site is _REALLY_ ugly. I had trou­bles to find some use­ful information.