TECH TRENDS: Cats in the waiting

There is a lot of hype and confusion over the 10G-over copper

solutions available in the market. Almost every vendor has a 10G or 10G ready

offering. However, the adoption of 10G has not been very enthusiastic. Specially

when hunger for better performance, higher bandwidth and greater speed is on the

rise, the structured cabling industry was expecting better acceptability of 10G

solutions than what it has turned out to be. Instead, network managers have

preferred to wait for the standards to be ratified and the technology to be

proven before investing in these cables.

ADC Krone has seven 10G-over-UTP installations in India, which

is the highest in Asia. Systimax has announced one installation and is under the

process of installing five more. "There have been few installations of 10G

but these are only adopters. The reasons being that there are plenty of

unresolved issues in the ratification of the standard, in testing of the cables,

and absence of active components to support them," says Ashish Chand,

country manager (India) & Regional Manager (SAARC), Belden CDT.

The ratification of standards of 10G over UTP is expected to

happen in the early 2006 time frame. During the same time component

manufacturers like Cisco, Foundry, Extreme and Solar Flair are expected to come

out with port and switch support for these cables.

So the question that comes up is what is all this excitement

about when only cables are there in this category and the rest of the supporting

matter is absent. The fact is that cable planning is done almost 15 years ahead

and estimates today are drawn keeping in mind future requirement of at least

seven years.

"10G has been more on talk and less on activity. With

standards not there vendors claim to be 10G ready, subject to specified

installation practices. Today, there are products within Cat6 which meet 10G

performance of up to 40 meters. However, in the long run, Cat A6 in the backbone

would be a value proposition," says KK Shetty, country manager, AMP

Netconnect.

10G in the Backbone



With the type of applications available today, the bandwidth capacity of 10G

is not useful for the desktop or what is called the horizontal cabling within

the campus or building. However, on the backbone front, traditionally, fiber has

been the preferred medium. But structured cabling vendors are optimistic about

the price of 10G over copper cables and components to be almost 60% less than

fiber. Sale volumes and basic copper prices would be a major factor in

determining what cost advantage would exist.

10G Base T...When? Market for 10G or CatA6 is expected to grow after the standard is ratified in July 06

"As the volume grows, there would be a reduction in product

prices. For 10G over copper, we expect the demand to pick up once the relevant

IEEE standard (802.3an) is ratified and commercial deployment of active

equipment increases," says SA Mohan, general manager (sales and marketing),

Molex India.

Technologies Available



It would be unfair to think that all action in the structured cabling market

is limited to 10G over copper. Today, one can go and buy cables in the Cat5,

Cat5e, Cat6, Cat6 (10G ready) and Cat7 categories. The battle of market share,

however, is between Cat 5e and Cat 6. While Cat 5e has the capability of

delivering 1G over the available transmission equipments, Cat6 on the other hand

gives enough head room in terms of electrical parameters like noise, cross talk,

alien cross talk etc in the same bandwidth space.

While Shetty says Cat 5e is sufficient for applications

available today, others like Ashish say it might move the market in favor of

CatA6 and Cat6-which has lot of market support today-and might lose out just

like Cat5 lost to Cat5e.

Adoption of Cat7 is missing from India. The Cat7 standard is

still in draft stages; as a result, the product/performance specs are still

being defined. So customers are also not asking for this product as there are no

specific applications, current or planned, which need a Cat7 system. "Cat7

is also yet to find customer base in India due to its high price and STP

version," says Vikas Pinjarkar, general manager-SCS (Business Developement),

D-Link India.

In fact, globally also the market acceptance of Cat7 has been

very low, with only a 0.4% market share in 2004. It has mostly found limited

applications in power plant or other high electrical noise environments.

Status of Power over Ethernet



Power over Ethernet again has not taken off in India. The technology allows

IP telephones or IP devices, wireless LAN access points and many other

appliances to receive power as well as data over Ethernet. PoE IEEE 802.3 af is

a ratified standard and, presently, most heard of. As the wireless and VoIP

market is growing up, the use of PoE technology has started taking momentum.

More than 200 PoE products are available worldwide.

10G Base T...When? Market for 10G or CatA6 is expected to grow after the standard is ratified in July 06

For the cabling infrastructure, it is important to have

components that support the IEEE 802.3af protocol fully. "The mating of

plugs and connectors under electrical load can cause sparks. If they occur in

the contact zone, it will result in a poor contact and inferior reliability. The

connecting modules should ensure that sparks will not affect the contact zone,

thus ensuring optimum performance for the life of the product," says Gaurav

Ahluwalia, country manager (India), Reichle De Massari.

The growth in PoE is directly linked to the rapid growth in

IP-based applications (telephony and video). Globally, the groundwork is already

laid for PoE because the vast majority of businesses have Category 5 LAN that

can accept PoE with no changes and also because LAN cabling is increasingly

available in a number of common work. There is also a constant effort to bring

in more devices like laptops, cell phones and PDAs that PoE can support.

In a nutshell, the structured cabling industry, comes out with

products before standards are decided and offers warranty on performance levels

after ratification. However, almost 90% of customers wait for the final verdict

before putting their money in new technologies. So it would be better if the

industry bodies speed up their ratification and standard freezing processes;

otherwise confused customers would continue to buy older products.

Anurag Prasad