Ashish Chand, country manager, India and regional manager-SAARC, Belden CDT

What are the trends in structured cabling industry?
Continued adoption of Cat6 for new installations, however, this is expected to slow down once 10GB standards are ratified. Serious end users are moving away from low quality solutions that were widely adopted in the 2002-04 period. This is because of poor results from these products. However, end users expect MNC brands to become increasingly competitive.

The cabling companies have come out with products ahead of ratification of standards. Why do you think clients should invest in 10G kind of technologies when there are neither standards nor any uses for these cables?

Ashish Chand

In a network, cables, switches and software riding them are the main components. Cables typically have 7-8 year life cycle, switches have 2-3 years and software one year. On the investment side, software takes up maximum and needs to be upgraded more frequently. Estimates show that though cables eat up less that 5% of the network cost, once installed, it is not easy to rip and replace them frequently. So the network manager has to evaluate and buy according to future requirements. So if he buys standardized cables for his current requirement and wait for the higher bandwidth ones to be ratified he might end up spending more. Moreover the warranty, which accompanies these cables, ensures that clients are not at a loss while buying products like 10G taking into account their future needs.

What is your presence in the Indian market?
Belden CDT has been in India since mid-2003. We address the technology conscious markets across segments and have been very successful in penetrating key customer accounts, especially in IT & ITeS and Banking. Today, we have over a 4% market share in structured cabling for data networking and this is growing steadily. In 2004, Belden CDT introduced the high end Belden IBDN end-to-end solutions for copper and fiber that provide guaranteed performance over standards. These solutions have been widely appreciated and adopted.

What category cables are selling more in the market?
Installation of cables depends on the requirement of the customer. Currently for 10G over copper, switches are not available and should be out by the first half of 2006. Today there are no commercially available instruments or standards to measure cross talk in 10G cables. Fluke has tested with two cables but not with a bundle of 10-12 cables. Once these pain points are removed, then its sale should pick up though it is being sold now also. But most of them prefer Cat6 now. However, for up to 1G requirements, CAT5e is a good choice. Today Cat6A is using the 1G switching but has 10G capacity. Just as it happened between Cat5 and Cat5e, Cat6 may also be pushed out on price points when compared to Cat6A.