Category 6 UTP Standard is (finally) Here

An anonymous reader writes "This is only important for the networkphiles out there, but the Category 6 UTP specification is finally here. The standard is the TIA/EIA-568-B.2-1. The significance of this is that now you can transmit at 250Mhz frequencies (vs 100Mhz of Cat 5/5e). So 1Gbps is easily achievable. Of course ther's still Category 7 (600Mhz) in development, but I guess we should eventually move to fiber." Who hasn't crimped cat-5 before?

Comments

Compare the cost of copper and fiber...

[Bonker]

...When you're wiring about 500 workstations and servers over a reasonably sized office. You run into having to buy literally *miles* of cable when you wire even a medium-sized IT office. At that volume, buying Cat6 or Cat5 is non-trivially less expensive than fiber.

Re:Why?

[GigsVT]

Although, I suppose it should be theoretically possible to create a standard that uses just one universal ground wire for a 600x7 = 4.2Gbps rate...

Uh, last I checked, Ethernet is a balanced signal, there is no ground. This eliminates problems with ground potentials between two distantly seperated devices.

It's basically like this
Pair:
TX+
TX-

Pair:
RX+
RX-

High signal might be +5 and -5 on the other, in relation to some certain ground. There is no single point of reference per se, it's just the difference between the voltages. The same signal may appear to be +7 and -3 at the other side, but it doesn't matter that the ground potential is different, since the difference is the same.

I think GB ethernet does something slightly more complex, but I believe that is a balanced system too. Coax is unbalanced, there is a ground on the sheath, hence you use a Bal-Un (Balun) (balanced to unbalanced) to convert between the two.

Also your post is ignorant in other ways, you think we can only encode one bit per cycle? This is analog we are talking about here, things like QAM let you get several bits per cycle.

Re:100Mbit vs. 1000Mbit?

[Clue4All]

Yes, it will increase the distance that gigabit copper can be run, as well as increase the signal-to-noise ratio. With gigabit switches starting to hit the market at decent prices now, I'd be very surprised if we saw slower hardware than that making use of Cat6.