Cat5e & Cat6 Copper Cable

With the growth of streaming media applications including multimedia and video, and bandwidth-intensive applications such as voice over IP (VoIP), the demand for faster data rates is set to continue. In the past, the trend has been for data transfer rates to double every 18 months. Applications in use today running at 1Gbps are at the limits of the capabilities of Cat5e cable.

The main difference between Cat5e and Cat6 is in the transmission speed, Cat5e operates at a frequency of 100MHz, compared to Cat6 which operates at 250MHz. This results in Cat5e being capable of transmission speeds of up to 1Gbps, compared to 10Gbps for Cat6. This is also achieved by reduced insertion loss, near end crosstalk (NEXT), return loss, and equal level far end crosstalk (ELFEXT).

These improvements lead to a higher signal-to-noise ratio, allowing greater reliability for today's applications and a higher data rate for tomorrow's.

10GBASE-T (10Gbps Ethernet over twisted pair copper cable) is on the immediate horizon. This standard will start to be installed from the second quarter 2006 with Ultima leading the way with an early adoption.