Category 6 (CAT 6) technology is rapidly growing in the telecommunications industry’s commercial market. CAT 6 has been under development since late 1997. Originally, the wiring was intended to go from the 100 MHz capability of CAT 5 to 200 MHz, but later that was revised to 250 MHz. CAT 6 provides for other metrics as well, variables that become important at high bandwidth rates. These include crosstalk, or interference between wire pairs, and skew, the difference in timing of signals on the wires.
CAT 6 is the latest type of four pair twisted copper cable designed for high speed data transmission. CAT 5 was initially touted as the last cable you'll ever need, but then came Gigabit Ethernet, which pushed the technology to its limits and used all four pairs of wires in the cable. So, manufacturers started making, "enhanced", versions of the cable (hence the "E”).
Bandwidth precedes data rates just as highways come before traffic. Doubling the bandwidth is like adding twice the number of lanes on a highway. The trends of the past and the predictions for the future indicate that data rates have been doubling every 18 months. Current applications running at 1 Gb/s are really pushing the limits of Category 5E cabling. As streaming media applications such as video and multi-media become increasingly commonplace, the demands for faster data rates will increase and spawn new applications that will benefit from the higher bandwidth offered by Category 6. This is exactly what happened in the early ’90s when the higher bandwidth of Category 5 cabling compared to Category 3 caused most local area network (LAN) applications to choose the better media to allow simpler, cost effective, higher speed LAN applications, such as 100BASE-TX. It is also important to note that cabling infrastructure is generally considered a 10 year investment as opposed to one or three years for electronics or software.
For technical reference please review ANSI/TIA/EIA 568-B.2-1 Commercial Building Telecommunications Cabling Standard “CAT6 Standards”.
