Companies will now be able to accomplish more without having to shell out for rewiring with the new approved Ethernet standard that boosts connection speeds up to 5Gbps.
The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) approved the new Ethernet standard proposed by the NBASE-T Alliance speeding up the connection up to 5Gbps. Using Cat 5e and Cat 6, the standard IEEE 802.3bz allows traffic up to 2.5 to 5 gigabytes. This will allow networks to be upgraded without massive rewiring, which obviously brings additional costs to the enterprises.
"Going beyond 1 Gb/s with existing Cat5e and Cat6 cables was little more than a talking point two years ago. But now with NBASE-T, we have the ability to extend the life of an enormous asset -your wired network. The Cat5e and Cat6 installed in just the last 15 years now exceeds an estimated 70 billion meters of cabling", said Satin Gupta of CISCO.
With the evolution of the wireless connection, Wi-Fi has been the connectivity choice in today's consumer world. But since ethernet infrastructures are still being used by major enterprises, the only way to survive the market is to beef up the speed of connections.
"As new 802.11ac Wave 2 wireless technology is being deployed the need to offload more and more data at higher and higher speeds from the wireless to the wired network has never been so critical," Sachin Gupta, vice president of product management at Cisco, wrote about the announcement.
Further, he said: "The advent of the new Ethernet standard will increase the speeds of the enterprise's networks by up to five times just by upgrading their networks' equipment, such as network switches, something that is much less painful than having to rip out miles of cabling."
"Last quarter, NBASE-T switch and access point ports surged significantly as enterprises began to upgrade their campus networks to speeds beyond 1G," said Alan Weckel, vice president of Ethernet switch market research at Dell'Oro Group.
It is expected that the robust growth for the coming year will head the way to upgrade cycle on NBASE-T technology. This would also mean that NBASE-T port shipments will exceed three million ports by 2017.
