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No matter how much bandwidth becomes available today, it will get used up tomorrow, thanks to the rate at which bandwidth-hungry applications are arriving at user-ends.

The challenge before the structured cabling industry is to ensure that the LAN infrastructure is robust enough to take the load on the fly.

Over the past ten years, speed requirements for some, if not all, enterprise applications have progressed from 10 Mbps to 1 Gbps. The cabling infrastructure-the backbone of the network-must match these requirements, and provision for future ones.

While theoretically it's possible to attain 40 Gbps data speed over copper, electrical transmission of data generates multiple forms of noise from within and outside a cable. This effectively weakens the signal and makes the transmission faulty, even kills it.

Thanks to the rapid technological developments in the recent past, vendors have found ways to address the problems to a significant extent.

Even as the IEEE 802.3an task force continues to work on the requirements of twisted pair cables for supporting 10G Ethernet, at least three vendors have come out with their 10G over UTP offerings in India. The credit to do that first, however, goes to ADC Krone, which came out with its 10G solution in early 2004.

The product launch gave Krone an early-mover advantage, which the company was able to leverage successfully.

ADC Krone is understood to have bagged at least three significant orders for its 10 G UTP solution, CopperTen. Two of these orders came from i2 Technologies and TCS.

The CopperTen installation at i2 Technologies connects 4,000 points, servers and firewall systems within its software development facility.

Systimax and Belden also came out with their 10G solutions, Systimax GigaSpeed X10D and Belden IBDN 10GX respectively.

Tyco is also ready with a 10G-over-UTP solution.

As far as the structured cabling industry in India is concerned, 10G over UTP solutions generated a lot of interest. Most importantly, the hype was quickly followed by some actual orders and shipments.

All in all, the 10GE-over-UTP solutions that hit the market during the fiscal threw up a pleasant surprise by accounting for two percent of the installations.

All these solutions, however, are in the pre-standard stage. An IEEE group is already working on the 10G UTP standard and the ratification is likely to happen sometime in 2006. Once ratified, the standard will be called Cat A6.

Other companies are also testing 10G solutions at their respective labs.

Will Cat A6 reduce the shelf life of the current Cat 6 offerings? That's a question that vendors would like to answer rather diplomatically. Some say that Cat A6 will complement Cat 6 rather than cannibalize it.

In fact, the argument is valid if one looks at a two-three-year window. Around then, Cat 6 will be entering the last phase of its shelf life and it will anyways be time to give way to a new standard.

However, once the Cat A6 ratification happens next year, the funeral bells for Cat 5e will start ringing. Much like what happened to Cat 5 after Cat 6 arrived on the scene....

Vendors are unanimous on the view that early adopters of 10G-over-UTP will be data centers and other bandwidth-intensive businesses. Also, post ratification, 10G solutions will also be used for building backbones.

10G will also compete against fiber to an extent. True, copper will have disadvantages against fiber in terms of electrical interference, but there will be notable advantages too. The most significant of these would be in terms of lower equipment-and installation and maintenance costs. Also, the connections remain copper-to-copper and thus the cost of changing electrons to photons and back to electrons is avoided.

All said, the uptake of 10G-over-UTP in the market will also depend on how quickly vendors are able to educate enterprises on the benefits and possible usage of the new technology, as also on how fast apps move in to demand the higher bandwidth-and speed.

Deepak Kumar