Cat 7 is talked about, but Cat 6a has the edge

Cat 6a is the main attraction in the Indian cabling market. Cat 7 is being talked about but the action still centres around its predecessor. Priya Jain reports

Cat 5e with an operating frequency of 100 MHz has given way to Cat 6 with an operating frequency of 250 MHz. As of today, EIA/TIA (Electronic Industries Alliance/ Telecommunications Industry Association) has a standard in place that does not extend beyond Cat 6.

It’s quite interesting to speculate on cabling when the talk of the industry is wireless. But experts are of the view that in a country like India though wireless technology is accepted, wired connectivity continues to be strong. No wonder then that the cabling industry has seen robust growth. The structured cabling market stood at Rs 326 crore in 2004.

Other than the trend of shifting to Cat 6a, the cabling industry has been increasingly deploying Fast Ethernet for the desktop and Gigabyte Ethernet for campus backbones. Affordability and acceptance of network platforms are spurring the growth of cabling.

The growing need for faster data transmission and stable performance across a wider frequency range has given rise to Cat 6a (the ‘a’ is for augmented) and Cat 7. Once ratified, Cat 6a will be available at 550 MHz and Cat 7 at 600 MHz. Both can support up to 10 Gigabits per second on copper.

Cat 6a is the evolution of UTP cabling to support 10G and more bandwidth when compared to Cat 6.

Category 7 cabling is a recent improvement in cabling technology. It consists of individually shielded four-pair twisted cable with an intended operating frequency of 600 MHz. Commenting on the Indian scenario, K Surendar , Country Manager, Dax says, “The Indian market’s adoption of new cabling technology has been good. Deployment of Cat 6 is on par with Cat 5e...very much in line with international trends. Similarly, one expects Cat 6a to have good acceptance, which is bound to grow as costs come down. Today both Cat 6a and Cat 7 are on equal footing with a 2 percent market share each.”

Deciding for the better

So what will be more promising for next generation cabling—Cat 6a or Cat 7? Let’s analyse this keeping in mind the various issues that will be considered for the adoption of both the technologies in the market. The issues include operating frequency, speed, backward compatibility, installation convenience, sound-to-noise ratio and crosstalk.

Milind Tamhane, Vice-president, Passive Products, D-Link informs, “The performance of Cat 7 does not mean better speed of transmission. Rather, it means greater support for stable performance for a much wider frequency range...up to 900 MHz for sure. Some even claim 1.2 GHz as compared to 550 MHz in the case of Cat 6a.”

Surendar believes that Cat 6a will be backward compatible with the existing standards while the Cat 7 cable will be bulkier and require different types of components. For these reasons. it can be deployed only in new installations. Since the difference between Cat 6a and Cat 7 is only 50 MHz, the respective costs of these systems tend to be a major factor. While Cat 6a does not require any specific skill-sets because trained professionals on Cat 5e and Cat 6 may be able to upgrade to it effortlessly, Cat 7 may call for some extra training.

Prasanna Kumar, Director, India & SAARC, Systimax Solutions, points out that Cat 7 is a solution with shielded cabling media and requires more effort in installation to ensure grounding and screening continuity. Cat 7 certainly has a higher frequency specification; however, to date it does not support applications of a higher speed than Cat 6a. Moreover, in Cat 7 cabling, crosstalk is eliminated through shielding. But with different innovative methods to eliminate crosstalk in UTP Cat 6a cable, the required performance levels are achieved in the UTP cable itself. This makes Cat 7 cabling less attractive with no edge over UTP.

Experts point out that the components are shielded and have a provision for earthing in Cat 7. This reduces the noise level drastically and betters the Signal-to-Noise (S/N) ratio. That apart, Cat 7 is tested at higher frequencies than Cat 6a. Thus, it is a more balanced system and can be used in a noisy environment due to its capacity to suppress EMI and RFI effects vis-à-vis Cat 6a UTP systems.

Case Study 1: South Gujarat University

When Veer Narmad South Gujarat University was looking at networking its campus, the main concerns were cost-effectiveness, scalability, stability of products, and the timeframe of the rollout. Previously, they used Cat 5 cabling, but now in the new premises they wanted to provide their MCA and Computer Science departments with 100 Mbps Giga Internet facility which could be done by laying Cat 6 cables. The university was looking to connect its 26 buildings housing 18 departments. It has 2,000 regular students and almost 150 affiliated colleges. All of the university’s buildings in the campus, including the hostel building and the sports complex, are connected to the central computer centre through a 100 Mbps fibre backbone. The fibre and other components used are all single mode ones. It was intentionally done this way because in future they could be upgraded to 10G. The fibre covers an area of eight kilometres across the campus. The departments are hooked up with Cat 6 structured cabling. To avoid congestion on the network, the university opted for Cat 6 as its 100 Mbps strength gives sufficient headroom and bandwidth. The passive components include 8,500 metres of single mode steel tape armoured fibre with LIU, patchcords and so on. The DES–3226S is a stackable 10/100 Mbps Layer 2 switch designed specially for departmental connectivity. It provides 24 10/100 Mbps ports, one GBIC port for server or fibre backbone connection, and scalable expansion through switch-stacking of up to 13 units in a ring topology.

Varied options

With 10G being adopted, the choices can vary. Kumar says that today 10G applications can run on Cat 6a and Cat 7. To date, the collective intelligence of the global market has chosen UTP solutions over screened solutions based on the ease of installation, ruggedness, spatial efficiency, large bandwidth availability and cost-effectiveness. UTP is therefore likely to remain the most popular choice for cabling.

With Cat 6a guaranteeing 10 Gbps up to 100 metres, the argument of requiring Cat 7 to support 10 Gbps is certainly not compelling. Notes Tamhane, “Lot of work is being done to achieve 10G using conventional UTP cables with superior cabling technique, improved hardware and trained installation practices. This makes Cat 6a a more popular option. Also, the cost advantage plays an important role in decision-making. Unless Cat 7 performance comes with more adaptable connecting hardware, it will keep losing popularity.”

Disadvantages of Cat 7

Will Cat 7 catch up? Kumar lists its few disadvantages: “The cables are bulky and the connectors require individually-shielded pairs which are not installer-friendly. Individual pair shielding slows down termination time, requiring close attention to grounding and bonding. This translates to 10 to 15 minutes per connection as against less than three minutes for a conventional UTP connection. The proposed Cat 7 solutions have two connector alternatives which are neither widely-accepted nor user-friendly.”

Many feel that due to this backward compatibility poses a big problem. The connectors are large, leading to issues of space in desks, walls and pathways. Cat 7 plugs are not compatible with existing network equipment—something which can translate into additional investments.

Implementation

The 10G/Cat 6a combination is certainly gaining acceptance, having been deployed in server farms, storage area networks, data centres and riser backbones, to start with.

A number of industry sectors utilise high- performance computing platforms to support bandwidth-intensive applications. They could be bioscience and pharmaceutical companies for R&D activities; financial services firms for quantitative analysis, and statistical and econometric modelling; and architectural and engineering firms for computerised CAD/CAM applications. “From our experience in India, the early adopters are in biotechnology and financial services,” says Kumar.

According to experts, deploying a Cat 7 network in the country would be restricted to those who have the capacity and volumes. For instance, the Ship Building Corporation of India at Visakhapatnam is one such place where Cat 7 has been deployed.

Analysts state that Cat 7 is expected to capture 0.4 percent of the global market by 2006; the low figure is largely because it is still to be ratified as an international standard. Having said that, companies that have a planning horizon of 10 years can justify the cost of a Cat 7 deployment (cable and connectors) because it saves money vis-à-vis alternative cabling methods that handle applications requiring increased bandwidth. Also, early adopters of any new technology (such as 10G Ethernet) or companies concerned with electromagnetic interference in an environment (such as a factory floor) tend to use Cat 7 cabling.

The road ahead

Cat 7 will take time to win over Indian IT. It depends on how the standards for 10G on Cat 6 UTP evolve. “We should keep in mind that 10G on UTP Cat 6a systems can deliver only up to 550 MHz frequency. In future those who are looking for higher frequency on their installation may need Cat 7 systems. Its costs are higher when compared to that of a Cat 6a UTP solution. With the rates of fibre optic cables going down, consumers will not hesitate to use fibre at the desktop with virtually unlimited bandwidth rather than go in for costly Cat 7 STP solutions,” predicts Tamhane. “India being a UTP market, Cat 7 cabling seems less likely to gain acceptance because of installation hurdles. For cabling technology to go mainstream, an increasing number of equipment manufacturers need to design a Cat 7 interface on their hardware. Companies will also have to grow accustomed to a different interface.”

Surendar has the last word: “Cat 7 may end up with many admirers, but at present Cat 6a looks more attractive.”

Case Study 2: Alok Industries

Alok Industries has shifted to Cat 5 and 6 cabling for its networking needs. Parallel to its growth in the textile business, Alok kept up its focus on IT infrastructure. Earlier, its business processes were handled by home-grown applications. The natural fallout of this was that islands of information were attached to these legacy applications. There were factory applications too (fabric inwards, quality inspection, goods receipt note, etc) that were used for everything from capturing production data to tracking finished products; these were written in FoxPro, so it took more than five days to compile an MIS report for the management. The rollout had to be as smooth as possible though the nature of the project was complicated. The project was divided into three phases. In the first phase, copper and fibre cabling within the premises, plant-to-plant outdoor, and underground cabling was done. Now they have opted for Cat 5 and Cat 6 cabling which provide them 99.9 percent uptime. Another factor pushing Alok to go in for networking infrastructure was the need to achieve standardisation and gain business intelligence across its locations. The company decided to deploy an ERP solution to enable the integration of multiple functions carried out at six different locations in Navi Mumbai, Vapi and Silvassa. High-end networking infrastructure was needed to run the ERP system efficiently and achieve maximum RoI. The main concern was to provide proper connectivity and the ideal monitoring solution. D-Link therefore provided them with IP cameras, proper connectivity, switches and routers, and made the monitoring activity simple. The network has been designed in such a way that it can be upgraded to 10 G in the future. The manageability features of the switch enable online monitoring and bandwidth control. Further, voice, video and data can travel on the same network without throughput issues, which will enable future projects to function at their best on the same network.

priya@expresscomputeronline.com