Cat6's Home, 10G Can Wait

Indian businesses are increasingly deploying applications such as video and
multi-media streaming, driving demand for faster data rates. The use of business
applications such as CRM, ERP, and SCM is also getting more widespread.
Moreover, the concept of networked software and services is also gaining ground.
New applications such as web conferencing that converge voice, data, and video
are also growing in usage. No doubt all this is fueling the hunger for bandwidth
among Indian companies. The demand for faster data rates that would help
companies run new applications is growing.

Given all this, it's no surprise that Cat6 has become commonplace in India.
“Cat6 has become quite common in India. It provides very good bandwidth and
better connectivity than Cat5,” says Arindam Bose, head, IT, LG Electronics.
Deepak Konnur, IT head of North Delhi Power Limited (NDPL), points out that 90 %
of the enterprise networks are now coming on Cat6.

According to KR Krishnakumar, VP, IT, Grasim Industries, even though the
current Cat5 infrastructure can reasonably support the increasing compute power,
storage requirements, and the traffic for every workstation, it would not be
long before the growing end-users' demand pushes the traffic to the limits
compelling an upgrade to Cat5 and beyond.

There are many reasons why Cat 6 is becoming the cabling standard of choice
of Indian companies. NDPL's Konnur points out that Cat6 components are
specified to be interoperable between different vendor's products and are
fully backward compatible with all lower categories. Cat6 components from
different vendors can be mixed and matched to form a minimally compliant Cat6
channel. Also Cat6 component can be substituted in any existing Cat5 or 5e
channel to give Cat5 or 5e performance respectively.

Moreover, Cat6 components have the same nominal impedance of 100 Ohms as Cat5
and 5e components, but have a tighter tolerance on Impedance variations. Cat6
provides better Bit Error Rate (BER) performance. “More frequently occurring
bit errors means that expensive networking devices are caught in unproductive
cycles of error detection and re-transmission resulting in accurately and
rapidly transferring information that drives business and improves
productivity,” Konnur points out.

Cat6 yields a bandwidth of 200 MHz at 20 degrees for the most demanding 100
meter channel configurations compared to a bandwidth of 100 MHz for Cat5/5e.
Bose points out that the quality of Cat6 gives it an edge when used for
outdoors. Christopher Stanley of ITC points out that Cat6 enables one to get
access in hard to get connected places and through passive components standard,
it influences active components on the standard.

10G Comes Calling

Even though 10G over copper or fiber is still a year before commercial
deployments really start taking place; it is already started gaining attention
in India. However, the main problem with 10G is that of standards. 10G standards
are still a moving target. Moreover, only a small number of companies need the
kind of throughput that 10G on copper brings to the table. Unless a company has
its own data centres or SAN, it doesn't really need to invest in 10G.

Konnur says that 10G might take a couple of years to come to India. “Even
though people in India are increasingly becoming aware of 10G and are deploying
it in data centers and for applications that require large bandwidth, if seen
from the user perspective then we might not need 10G. Nevertheless 10G can be
useful in case of our server consolidation,” he observes. Pointing out that
the basic benefit that 10G provides is a higher bandwidth on copper, Konnur
urges that applications that require voice transfer, data, broadband, and base
band video can run on Cat6 so can applications for building management and
security also require Cat6.

“Cat6 does not satisfy 10G compliance over the full channel distance.
Moreover, as companies use their networks for voice, video and data by
introducing more IP devices on the network, it leads to a demand for the
next-generation ethernet technology,” Konnur emphasizes.

ITC's Stanley is sure that in 2 years, 10G network would bring about a
change in the core of cable changing. “Devices are being connected by
throughput. The more the convergence of voice, data and video, higher the demand
for bandwidth would be. The effective throughput would be may be million times
more that what is today,” he says, adding that all this would have a cascading
effect on phones, PDAs, and laptops. 

Whether Cat6 or 10G, it's requirement is going to drive everything. At the
moment, it seems Cat 6 would rule the roost in Indian enterprises at least for
the next couple of years largely, because they don't need the kind of
bandwidth that 10G supports. It is unlikely that Indian companies who have
invested in Cat6 in the past couple of years would spend on another technology
so soon.

Ravi Shekhar Pandey

mail@dqindia.com