Structured cabling has grown globally into a $4 billion market and is expected to continue grow­ ing at about a 4 percent compound annual growth rate, according to leading independent ana­ lysts*. Category 6 cabling is the latest addition to the structured cabling standards and has twice the bandwidth of category 5e cabling. This improved bandwidth, together with vastly improved immunity from external noise, provides the potential for category 6 to support multi-gigabit applications. This white paper provides an update on category 6 cabling and applications stan­dards together with references for finding category 6 information and products.

Comparision Cat5, 5e and 6 Standards.

Key Features of the Category 6 Standard

Following are the top three areas that required new development work for the category 6 specifi­ cations.

1) Test plug qualification for near-end crosstalk (NEXT) and far-end crosstalk (FEXT) . This is the fundamental basis for plug and jack interoperability between manufacturers.

2) Patch cord performance requirements and test specifications. Patch cord testing is key to ensuring interoperability. This has been included in the category 6 standard as a funda­ mental requirement and not as an addendum, as was the case for category 5e.

3) Measurement procedures for connecting hardware NEXT and FEXT . These procedures required the creation of brand new fixtures, calibration procedures and many refinements to ensure repeatability in different laboratories.

ISO/IEC 11801:

The second edition of the ISO/IEC 11801 standard includes category 6 components as well as cabling. In ISO/IEC 11801, category 6 cabling is referred to as "Class E Cabling." . This allows manufacturers and customers to choose category 6 cabling sys­ tems that have the same performance anywhere in the world to support all emerging applica­ tions.

CENELEC EN-50 173:

The second edition of the EN 50173 standard also includes category 6 components as well as cabling. The category 6 specifications included in the EN 50173 second edition are essentially the same as in ANSI/TIA-568-B.2-1 and the ISO/IEC 11801 second edition to facilitate global compatibility of cabling and emerging applications.

ANSI/TIA-854 1000BASE-TX Standard for Gigabit Ethernet over Category 6 Cabling

The ANSI/TIA-854 standard, "A Full Duplex Ethernet Physical Layer Specification for 1000Mbit/s (1000BASE-TX) Operating over Category 6 Balanced Twisted-Pair Cabling," provides a data rate of 1000 Megabits/second, similar to the IEEE 802.3ab Gigabit Ethernet standard. The main difference is that it requires category 6 cabling instead of category 5e cabling. Because of the improved performance of category 6 cabling, the ANSI/TIA-854 standard does not implement NEXT cancellation or echo cancellation, and therefore reduces the cost, complexity and power consumption of TIA-854 chipsets compared to IEEE 1000BASE-T chipsets.

ATM Forum LAN Standards

This standard provides a 1000 Megabits/second data rate over standard category 6 channels of 100 meters using the standard ATM cell format. This standard is now included in the ISO/IEC 11801 list of recognized application standards for Class E (category 6). The ATM version of the Gigabit standard provides seamless connectivity between LAN, MAN and WAN networks that use the ATM protocol.

Other Application Committees

Now that the category 6A installed base is poised to quickly overtake the category 6 installed base, there is interest in using category 6A cabling in several other application committees. This work should gain momentum in the next few months, with new projects expected to be announced to develop applications faster than 10 Gigabit over 100 meters of standardized category 6A cabling.

Summary

The opportunity to take advantage of the superior performance of category 6 is very clear for cus­ tomers, application developers and cabling system vendors. Category 6 will provide improved data throughput compared to category 5e because of the improved signal-to-noise ratio that is directly related to throughput. This improved performance will also increase the reliability of premises networks by reducing network errors and associated downtime. Emerging applications are much easier to implement on category 6 than on category 5e because of the superior transmission per­ formance of the category 6 cabling system. The combined cost of category 6 cabling and network equipment should provide the most cost-effective solution to increase data rates for customers.

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