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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