Cabling

Cat 6 today, intelligent cabling tomorrow

While Cat 5e still accounts for the biggest chunk of the market, Cat 6 is rising fast and intelligent cabling is taking its first steps, says Prashant L Rao

The Indian market for structured cabling is estimated to be in the region of Rs 250 crore. While the software services industry is the biggest consumer of structured cabling in the country, the rising star is BPO/ITeS that’s picked up considerably in the past year. The biggest deployments are in these two sectors, with the largest of these topping out at 40,000 to 45,000 nodes. Banking, financial services and insurance (BFSI), education, government and manufacturing are other segments using structured cabling. From a technology standpoint, Cat 6 is starting to take a bigger portion of this market.

Cat 6 dominates large deployments

Cat 5 is out of the market for the greater part. While Cat 5e is good enough for Fast Ethernet (the dominant medium on LANs), Cat 6 already accounts for 37-38 percent of the market. That’s expected to go up in 2004 to 45-50 percent. Cat 6 is already the cabling of choice in any large installation of a thousand-plus nodes. Cat 5e dominates the lower segment. Medium-sized and large installations use Cat 6. At the very top of the cabling food chain you find intelligent cabling starting to make its mark. Tyco has five to six projects in this area.

Establishments going in for large deployments, particularly in greenfield set-ups, tend to play it safe and go with Cat 6 to future-proof their investments. The declining prices of Cat 6 cabling and equipment is helping to fuel this trend. “The cost differential between Cat 6 and Cat 5e is narrowing down. Cat 6 is the medium of choice when there are over a thousand nodes. Companies pick Cat 6 with a view to future-proofing,” says S A Mohan general manager, Sales & Marketing, Molex (India). The difference in prices of Cat 6 and Cat 5e is estimated to be somewhere between 25 and 40 percent today.

Cat 7—not quite future perfect

So what’s next after Cat 6? The answer to that is complicated. To start with, today’s applications don’t even need the bandwidth provided by Cat 6. Cat 5e works fine for conventional LANs. Today, companies use 100 Mbps (at the most) connection to the desktop with Gigabit Ethernet being restricted to the backbone for connecting servers. Cat 6 can handle a lot more than that and this headroom will continue to exist in the immediate future.

Still, looking ahead there is a Cat 7 standard that is being discussed by ISO. It will be a shielded twisted pair system. Eventually, as the demand for bandwidth grows, Cat 7 will become necessary. “The impetus for Cat 7 will grow when the backbone migrates to 10 Gbps,” says Mohan.

Each vendor has its own design for connectivity for Cat 7. Cat 7 will provide 600 MHz of bandwidth. Cat 7 does not support the venerable RJ45 connector (the mainstay of today’s LANs). The lack of support for UTP (unshielded twisted pair) could affect Cat 7’s popularity when a standard emerges. “It may not make much of a difference to the Indian market where UTP is used for most installations,” says K K Shetty, country manager-NETCONNECT Solutions Division, Tyco Electronics Corporation India.

Industry consensus is that fibre works out to be cheaper than Cat 7, which will most probably be relegated to the defence and aerospace industries where they have specific need for this kind of technology. It will take two more years before Cat 7 comes of age.

An interim standard is likely to come into use on the road to Cat 7. “We expect Cat 6 to be optimised on the route to Cat 7. You will have a standard in between, something like Cat 6e. The application can be Gigabit Ethernet,” says D S Nagendra, country sales manager, Krone Communications.

Krone has already announced the launch of 10 Gigabit UTP cable, an augmented Category 6 cable designed and developed at the company’s US-based copper cable-manufacturing facility in Sidney, Nebraska. The cable demonstrated 21 Gbps due to the improved alien crosstalk immunity and the reduced insertion loss, more than adequate for the 10 Gbps Ethernet implementations being considered by the IEEE standard working group.

Intelligent cabling solutions

Intelligent cabling is an offshoot of the rising number of nodes in large installations and the management problems that result from having such complex set-ups. In a call centre, you will find hundreds or thousands of nodes hooked up to the telecom room. Managing changes in location of computers and ensuring that they are still hooked up correctly is a significant challenge. That’s where an intelligent cabling system or solution comes into the picture.

“Normal cabling is passive. For a call centre with thousands of nodes, managing the telecom room manually becomes very complex. With intelligent cabling the need to manually update a database of connected nodes is done away with as it automatically records changes as physical links are moved. With an intelligent cabling system in place you can record how many nodes are vacant. The software runs on a central server and it is Web-enabled. There’s some degree of security built into the solution; administrators get alerts if a patch cord is disconnected. Intelligent cabling goes for a 40 to 60 percent premium over Cat 6,” says Shetty.

Tyco’s intelligent cabling solution is called AMPTRAC—it converts a cabling system and its connected devices into an intelligent network, letting you track and document all changes to your network from a centralised location. It optimises asset utilisation and maintains documentation. The system is a hardware/software combination, AMPTRAC is the hardware and iTRACS the software that provides customisable alerts and alarms and optimises network security and monitoring. The system can generate a complete physical topology of your network at the telecom equipment room.

King of the LAN

There’s more to structured cabling than meets the eye. From passive to ‘intelligent’ systems that keep track of what’s connected where, things are changing for the better. As with processors, cabling capacity keeps growing and that’s not going to change any time soon. Again, as with processors, the need for increase in capacities is diminishing with few applications requiring even Gigabit Ethernet. Still, one thing that you can be sure of is that demand will rise and eventually 10 Gigabit backbones will become commonplace. Copper will continue to be the preferred route to the desktop despite all the hype about fibre to the desktop. Expect an interim standard for copper to follow Cat 6, which itself will take a couple of years to supplant Cat 5e. It’s interesting to speculate on the effect of wireless technology on something as basic as structured cabling. In the near term, cabling is safe as wireless costs more and is slower to boot. In the long term, it’s anybody’s guess. If wireless equipment prices drop sufficiently and speeds ramp up, it’s hard to see why anyone would prefer to be wired. That’ll take a while, if it ever happens, and till then structured cabling remains the king of the LAN.

prashant@expresscomputeronline.com