Smart Cities to Drive Structured Cabling Market

By Invitation Gaurav Ahluwalia

Gaurav Ahluwalia

The structured cabling landscape is changing in India every year. As companies realize the need for faster, reliable and future-proof networking solutions, IT managers are looking for solutions that offer higher security and stronger IT infrastructure to drive their future needs. Government initiatives have also had a positive impact on the structured cabling industry. The Smart Cities initiative and the big push towards digitization have created tremendous growth potential for the structured cabling market in India.

A smart city is based on a strong, reliable communication network that requires a lot of fiber optic cabling, which forms the backbone for future-capable wireless networks. According to TechSci Research report ‘Market Study on Upcoming Smart Cities in India: 2015’, the smart cities project in India would involve overall investments in tune of USD 2 trillion for development of trunk and internal infrastructure in 100 cities planned under the project. With seamless, secure connectivity becoming the fundamental requirement for all the businesses, here are the 5 key trends that would be seen in structured cabling market in the coming year:

• Shift in the usage ratio of fiber and copper products: With fiber optic cables offering the advantage of being immune to electromagnetic interference and having higher bandwidth, their usage is likely to be higher as compared with copper products.
• Greater focus on future-proof networks: Increasing focus on digital networks will require companies to invest more on future-proofing their networking and data center facilities to ensure that they remain nimble and flexible in the years to come.
• Growth in Automated Infrastructure Management solutions: The demand for AIM solutions will be higher as IT managers look for better monitoring and enhanced security in the data centers.
• Enhancement of pre-existing technologies: As we move towards an overall smarter IT environment, most companies will be forced to upgrade their pre-existing network infrastructure to higher versions. This will certainly benefit them in terms of higher speed and increased efficiency.
• Ultra High Density solutions: Among the other key developments in the structured cabling industry, Ultra High Density solutions will gain maximum traction in 2017. These are pre-terminated optical cabling systems designed to deliver high-performance in network infrastructure.

In the year 2016, the structured cabling market in India was on a growth trajectory with fiber showing a surge in OM3 (optical fibre designed for 10GB/s transmission) as it is a good option in data centers based on the current standards. With newer technologies in fiber coming in we will see a larger use of fiber for various projects, however copper still has a long inning to play.

In the recent months, structured cabling has seen more implementations of Automated Infrastructure Management systems. This enables organizations to monitor their network, and control it in case of any errors, hence reducing downtime drastically. Developments in new Cat.8 technologies will help organizations in better data transmission but that’s something for the future at the moment.

R&M as a company will continue to develop and improve its existing product portfolio and this will allow us to grow across all segments of our business capabilities – structured cabling, FTTH or data center. R&M has always had a strong focus on enhancing the fiber and data center solution portfolio and it will continue to improve its strength in these areas.

The author of this article, Gaurav Ahluwalia is Managing Director at R&M