What about Category 6 & 7?
The standards for Category 6 and 7 are well
established; in fact they are already being
superseded by the next generation of cabling
system performance requirements. Category 6
is capable of a transmission frequency of 200
MHz and uses UTP or FTP cable and RJ45 connectors.
As with Category 5 and Category 5E before it,
Category 6 cabling system are constructed from
their components compliant parts to produce
and end-to-end channel that delivers the performance
necessary to minimise the bit error rate of
the transmitted signals.
Category 7 uses fully shielded
cables (overall shield and individually shielded
pairs) and a new connector type in order to
achieve 600 MHz capabilities. Whilst this connector
is compatible with the standard RJ45, the use
of an RJ45 will not deliver Category 7 channel
performance. Since Category 7 is a shielded
only solution its acceptance in our global market
place is restricted to those environments where
extremely high levels of electromagnetic interference
(EMI) are present such as industrial installations,
or certain European countries where shielded
cabling systems are the norm.
The immediate future (things
keep on changing)
The IT industry is never inactive, the networking
industry in never inactive, and nor too is the
cabling industry. To be able to deliver the
network protocols of tomorrow the cabling industry
needs to be one step ahead. Without the installed
base of correctly specified cabling infrastructure,
the next generation of networking protocol with
only ever exist in the imagination and laboratories
of its developers. Augmented Category 6 (AC6)
is the next generation of structured cabling
components and systems. Being developed to support
10G BaseT over both fibre and copper using UTP
and FTP cabling systems, this cabling standard
specifies the performance parameters of numerous
measurements, some of which are completely new,
up to 500MHz. The principle addition to the
AC6 standard is the inclusion of and alien cross
talk measurement. This new test is responsible
for determining the levels of external noise
originating not from within a single cable element,
but from all adjacent cabling elements. This
new noise model has become significant for AC6
cabling systems due to the higher frequencies
of the signals being transmitted. This highly
complex cable-to-cable relationship severely
increases the complexity of testing components,
permanent links and channels in the laboratory
and makes the field testing of these parameters
a very arduous task.
|
|
