The purpose of this document is to provide information on the specification of optical fibre cables with respect to the mechanical, ingress, climatic and chemical or electromagnetic characteristics (MICE) as classified in ISO/IEC 11801‑1.

In this classification system, each letter of the four initials of the acronym are subscripted with a value from one to three to indicate different severities. The current attributes and severities are found in Annex A.