Delhi has managed to avoid a traffic catastrophe, thanks to the large number of highways that have changed the skyline of the capital city. The same can’t be said of other metros though, where traffic is comparatively a snarl.

Enterprise data traffic too is growing at an alarming rate. It is estimated that it could soon be doubling every 18 months.

Is the data highway aka bandwidth there in place to take the impending load?

That’s the question that network managers keep visiting on a periodic basis. Finding the right answers to this and other related questions is what will help enterprises avoid jams in their network.

Technology Trends
The structured cabling market has been witnessing technology swings for a year or so. The erstwhile prevalent Cat 5 standards have been totally replaced by the Cat 5e as the default standard.

So far, Cat 5e cabling has been able to take care of various network application needs of enterprises. Times are changing though….

Soon, as newer applications begin pushing the limits of Cat 5e, the standard may not prove a choice good enough. True, some vendors have packed more enhancements into the standard and therefore such installations will be able to service the needs better, and longer too, but then that’s not going to be a very long term solution.

In particular, as streaming media applications such as video and multimedia become commonplace and spawn new applications, enterprises will feel the need for the higher bandwidth offered by Cat 6. This is exactly what happened in the early ’90s when the higher bandwidth of Cat 5 cabling compared to Cat 3 caused most LAN applications to choose the better media to allow simpler, cost-effective, higher-speed LAN applications such as 100 BASE-TX.

As far as LAN is concerned, standards committees are already working on 10G BASE-T and the fact is that they have ruled out Cat 5e as the underlying support infrastructure. That should make the alarm bell ring in the minds of network managers! It, therefore, makes sense to plan for Cat 6-based deployments.

Enter the fiber….
Big-bandwidth Fiber: Fiber has the capacity to carry much more data at a better speed as compared to copper. It offers potentially unlimited bandwidth. In the past, fiber was not so popular due to its high cost. Things, however, have significantly changed today. Moreover, as the trend of gigabit-to-the-desktop in the horizontal run catches up, fiber will increasingly become the preferred choice for campus-wide backbone applications too. Fiber-to-the-desktop is getting popular among end users, mainly due to the high speed it offers.

Copper vs Fiber: Trends indicate that in years to come, the choice for enterprise-wide backbone will become equally distributed between copper and fiber and many organizations will use both fiber and copper for their vertical cabling. However, the main reason for continued usage of copper will be economy—copper’s cheaper and easier to implement than fiber.

Globally too, as reported by various market research firms, a long inning is indicated for copper. A majority of users don’t see copper becoming obsolete even after 2007. Quite many see it going strong for another five years. Moreover, the constant technological improvement on the copper front means a prolonged life for the medium.

Backbone over Fiber?: Depending on the network usage and the kind of applications, the choice of the backbone cabling system can be determined. Multimode fibers are the preferred choice in most of the network designs today. Multimode fiber (both 62.5u and 50 u) offers virtually unlimited bandwidth to the entire network. The second choice for the backbone is 100 Ohm Cat 5e cables in multiple runs. This is a comparatively economic solution.

The most popular horizontal cabling system today is Cat 5e or Cat 6 UTP. Both these systems are capable of carrying data in the gigabit speed range. Fiber (two-core) is also seen in a few applications in the form of fiber-to-the-home (FTTH).

Cat 6 versus Cat 5e: Although Cat 6 cabling is taking a major ground as against Cat 5e and would completely dominate in near future. However, major deployments of Cat 5e cabling products are still going on. The continuing popularity of Cat 5e may be attributed to its capacity to deliver the gigabit speed. It is also a very reasonable solution, something that’s a major criterion in most projects.