Copper or fibre-the debate continues in structured cabling

According to the V&D 100, the structured cabling market in India was weakened by the economic slowdown but the segment is set to emerge from the ashes very soon. Industry experts believe the upward curve is only set to grow, especially with 3G and WiMax coming to India, while 4G (LTE) and other successful NGN technologies like 100G, are being deployed globally.

Says CP Rangaraj, product manager, enterprise cabling solutions, Anixter, “With the economic recession prevailing in the global markets, the structured cabling market in India saw a decline of close to 20% y-o-y. Most of the MNCs reduced the
IT spend, and were making decisions based on cost which resulted in the revenues going down for most vendors. Moreover, the rapid proliferation of the wireless technology and a widespread belief that it will eventually render physically structured cable technology redundant, bore bad news for the industry.”

However, all is not lost for the industry as according to Mylaraiah JN, country technical manager, Tyco Electronics the market is already showing significant signs of recovery after recessionary debacle of 2008-2009. “The IT, ITeS and BPO sectors have picked up significantly, major players like Infosys, Wipro, HCL, TCS, CTS, etc, have announced their recruitment plans. We also see expansions in banking and finance sectors, real estate, telecom, infrastructure, etc. While we do not think that 2010 can match the growth
that the industry experienced in 2008, it will be much better than 2009. India can hope for accelerated growth after 2011,” elucidated Mylaraiah.
Another big news in the industry this year is the acquisition of ADC India Communications (formerly Krone) by Tyco Electronics. Such consolidations threw questions about the survival of smaller players and tougher competition within the industry.
However, when talking about consolidations, Digilink had a different view. Milind Tamhane, VP, product management and exports, Digilink says, “A few years back, we demerged into two companies essentially because two teams can focus on two businesses and keep customers happy at the same time. There are excellent small players specializing in their niche areas-be it a small company good at providing cable management products or excellent rack manufacturers.”

What's On Offer?
With the structured cabling market making waves in the industry with consolidations, vendors are everyday improving their technologies to introduce better cabling solutions in the competitive market.

Category 5 or category 5e is the oldest form of cable in the market and in recent times, it has been on the downswing. According to Mylaraiah JN, “Cat 5 is almost an obsolete technology which has been removed from even ANSI/TIA-568C standards. Cat 5e seems to be doing okay in the voice applications of the LAN environment in premises or smaller cities.”
More and more enterprises are now standardizing on Cat 6 or Cat 6a for their structured cabling with zero downtime platforms. It is believed that Cat 6 has the biggest chunk of the cabling market. Cat 6 cable is typically made up of four twisted pairs of copper wire like other cables. However, what sets it apart is one particular structural difference: a longitudinal separator. This separator isolates each of the four pairs of twisted wire from the others, which reduces crosstalk, allows for faster data transfer, and gives Cat 6 cable twice the bandwidth of Cat 5. Not only is Category 6 cable future-safe, it is also backwards compatible with any previously existing Cat 5 and Cat 5e cabling found in older installations. However, concerns within the industry remained over the fact that while Cat 6 is the defecto industry standard, Cat 6a needs to see growth trajectories as practically there still are fewer applications beyond 1000Mb/s speeds on copper.
Dileep Kumar, product management, ADC India says, “70% of cabling is on Cat 6 today with majority of LAN cabling on cat 6. Cat 6a cabling adoption started gaining momentum of late, post the standards' ratifications. From a situation where cat 6a was restricted to data centers alone, many corporates have begun to consider Cat 6a in their LANs also to future proof their network. We predict that this trend will continue.”

The major changeover from Cat 5 to Cat 6 arrived when there was a price drop in Cat 6 products, making it more affordable. New networks in major metros and large premises/campus environment are on Cat 6. Almost all of the major installations in the last one-year have been on Cat 6. Another reason behind it is that Cat 6 has proven to be a strong standard, which has more or less taken care of all the issues like crosstalk, echo, return loss, etc., that are present in Cat5e, when it comes to supporting Giga (1000 base T) applications.
Mylaraiah elucidates, “Cat 6a twisted pair cabling which can support for 10G is becoming a defacto standard from last two years within the major telecom/enterprise data center environment where high bandwidth plays a critical role. 10G application is first going to be in data center or backbone connectivity. However, within the data center environment, 10 Gb/s over copper is a challenge for UTP systems. This is why global trends are moving towards STP solutions which has higher performance, significantly greater capacity with reliable service of up to 100m, relaxed installation, less concerns with regard to other cables and guaranteed 10G Ethernet performance with better value for money.”

Explaining the constraints of Cat 6 and Cat 6a technologies, Isaac Martin, senior marketing specialist, Molex says, “Cat 6a is being primarily deployed in some areas of the network, eg, backbone, data center, server farm, ie, areas where speeds up to 10G are desired. Cat 6a is a 500 MHz system suited for such high speed applications, and shielded systems are preferred due to their ability to isolate A-NEXT effectively. Cat 6a is still not the preferred choice for desktop cabling as the cable diameter for Cat 6a cables is higher than Cat 6, which means that the number of cables that can be deployed in the same size of raceway are in case of Cat 6a than in case of Cat 6. However, this is not a constraint in server farms or data centers where there is ample space available below the raised floor.”

Copper Over Fiber?
One of the trends that the industry has been witnessing is opting of fiber over copper technologies. While the fiber market has shown a good improvement, especially in the telecom and
data center markets for SAN connectivity and on-the-LAN premises or campus backbone connectivity, copper cabling is still the technology that continues to dominate across the broader spectrum.
Copper can support up to 10G compliant high bandwidth applications that are less costly than fiber networks. The cost of fiber networks, compared to that of copper is higher because of the difference in LAN electronics per port cost, which is higher in fiber. Another reality is that apart from data center environments or LAN backbone, where uptime and high bandwidth play a major role, other areas within a premises or verticals do not require such high bandwidth intensive applications supported by fiber and can run effectively on copper.
Mylaraiah continues, “Today, both fiber and copper have major advances in bandwidth capability. To support the next generation of LANs at 10 GB per second, multimode fiber has advanced to new levels to support laser based systems whereas the industry is developing UTP cabling that will provide at least a three-fold increase in bandwidth, but the limitation is distance. Fiber optic is the dominant type of cable for connecting separate buildings on campuses and connecting floor distributors to building distributors. Because of its high cost on the LAN equipment side, it has been limited to the backbones. If we compare the cost of a fiber port on the active equipment and that of Gigabit copper port on the active equipment, the fiber is almost six times higher. Another major reason is that networks in India are now extending to smaller B, C, and D class cities where size of the networks are much smaller and copper proves to be an effective medium for these small to medium sized networks.”

Tamhane of Digilink reveals that copper is still the preferred medium and enjoys over 65% of the pie, fiber though has far more growth and has eaten in the copper's portion. In fiber, single-mode has been growing steadily, especially in WAN environments and initial phases of FTTH deployments.

DS Nagendra, general manager, LAN, Nexans agrees and says that copper cabling has still been the preferred choice on horizontal cabling within the buildings, and fiber has been the choice for the vertical backbone and campus networks.
Data transmission is growing so significantly that it is expected to be six times larger in 2012 than it was in 2007. Though copper is still the preferred choice today, fiber has a major role in data centers and backbone cabling. Says Dileep Kumar, product management, ADC India, “The industry is responding to these needs with advancements like 40 GbE and 100 GbE, fiber channel over Ethernet (FCoE), server virtualization, and IP convergence. These new technologies also have implications for the data center infrastructure, including new cabling and connector solutions, higher fiber densities, higher bandwidth performance, and the need for enhanced reliability, flexibility and scalability. Copper cables constitute around 70% of the structured cabling business in India and is gaining importance in specific niche areas.”

Structured cabling vendor, Anixter, conducted a study on copper cabling versus fiber to get a better understanding of the market. The results only confirmed that the copper cabling, which accounted for 80% of the total market in 2009, would account for 85% of the total market in 2014.

Rangaraj elaborated, “Whereas fiber cabling will continue to make inroads into the data center cabling market, copper cabling will also be used extensively in future VoIP systems. Other factors contribute to our overall analysis, but these are two of the primary drivers for the future structured cabling systems market. The difference exists in the limited distances found in data centers requiring fiber cable lengths, while the VoIP systems will require long distance, separate, horizontal cabling between telecommunication rooms and the VoIP telephones to maintain voice quality. The VoIP cabling application is evocative of copper cable's growth in the early LAN market, when copper cabling was the link between the telecommunication rooms and each desktop computer.”

Optical Fiber to Replace Metal Local Loop?
As the need for bandwidth increases over time, vendors in the structured cabling industry are looking to propagate fiber-to-the-x (including FTTN, FTTH, FTTC, FTTK) as the next big wave in the industry that will promote the usage of optical fiber replacing all or part of the usual metal local loop used for the last mile telecommunication. Some market research data indicates an increased demand in Internet traffic.
Today, fiber optic 10 GB solutions are more prevalent than copper. One reason is simply because the supporting active component market is more mature with fiber. The 10GBA SE-T standard was released in 2006, and the market started seeing active components with this technology integrated in late 2008.

According to Rangaraj, although fiber-optic systems excel in high-bandwidth applications, optical fiber has been slow to achieve its goal of fiber to the premises or to solve the last mile problem. The choice between optical fiber and electrical (or copper) transmission for a particular system is made based on a number of trade-offs. “Therefore, optical fiber is generally chosen for systems requiring higher bandwidth or spanning longer distances than electrical cabling can accommodate. This will eliminate the metal local loop. The other benefits of fiber are its exceptionally low loss, allowing long distances between amplifiers or repeaters and its inherently high data-carrying
capacity, so that tho usands of electrical links would be required to replace a single high bandwidth fiber cable,” he elucidated.
Another benefit of fibers is that even when run alongside each other for long distances, fiber cables experience effectively no crosstalk, in contrast to some types of electrical transmission lines. This in principle eliminates the metal local loop.

Talking about fiber's adoption, Issac Molex, senior marketing specialist, Molex , “Fiber will most definitely replace metal but it will take some more time. While the fiber itself is relatively inexpensive, the opto-electronic converters, lasers, and electronics, will remain far more costly than the electrical Ethernet devices as 10 GB devices, which are soon becoming common. Copper connections are still prevalent on printed circuit boards, backplanes, interconnects, and most local area network (LAN) devices.”

Transmission in the networks is becoming more and more digital, and the need for broadband access has also resulted in optical fiber increasingly becoming the transmission medium of choice with inherent capacity to transmit all forms of communication.
With network traffic bound to grow in the future, service providers will need to make significant investments in laying of optic fiber network which offers faster connection with ultra high speed by many orders of magnitude over wireless. The advent of 3G, LTE, and FTTH will make it more important for service providers to roll out optic fiber based transmission networks, which have high bandwidth capabilities necessary to support these technologies.

Says Khader Basha, general manager, telecom, 3M, “3G and BWA services will be able to provide the benefit of voice, broadband connectivity, and high speed data downloading and computing to the common man on their mobile devices. This will also pave the way for deployment of optical transmission platforms and infrastructure to support the roll out of 3G and FTTH networks which provide greater bandwidth efficiency and decrease in operating costs as data traffic grows exponentially and revenues per bit decline. The demand for high speed and bandwidth hungry applications will make optical fiber based transmission a necessity.”

On a similar note, Mylaraiah adds, “Fiber-to-the-Home is already a reality in the newer townships being developed across the country. With the industry scaling up to converged networks very quickly, there is a distinct possibility that copper may get replaced by optical fiber in the last mile connectivity, which is now called the first mile.”

“Use of copper in last mile communication cannot be completely removed in telecommunication but as technologies such as GEPON, FTTH gain popularity fiber would gain far bigger share as preferred medium in last mile connectivity,” concluded Tamhane.

Madhura K Mukherjee
madhurak@cybermedia.co.in