The Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) is set to ratify the 10GbaseT standard by July of this year. While the standard promises 10Gbit/second signal speeds, companies will need to upgrade their existing cabling to handle the additional bandwidth.

Existing Cat5e is not officially supported by the 10GbaseT standard while Cat6 cabling is limited to 37m - even that is not guaranteed and is down from the 55m target. Cabling specialist Systimax is confident that signals will be able to travel as far as 100 meter with augmented copper.

Cat7, Category 7, cabling is still slated to handle 10GbaseT speeds up to 100 meters (600MHz spectral bandwidth). However, Cat7 does not use the standard RJ45 interface -- the proposed IEEE specification relies on the Nexans GG45 cable jack. GG45 is backwards compatible with Cat6 RJ45 interfaces, but when in Cat7 mode the four pairs along the corners of the input are used opposed to the four along the top of the cable.

While 10GbaseT standard is almost complete, 100GbaseT is prepared:

Systimax hopes its involvement with the Ethernet Alliance can create a forum for the discussion of new technologies like 100 gigabit Ethernet, which has yet to make it to the project stage with the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE), and is probably five to seven years away from commercial deployment.

This news article was written on April 13, 2006, quoting VNU Net.