Network Communications News (NCN) May 2016 | Page 29

copper cabling systems

Compression of the data, mainly
due to enhanced, on-chip, networking
CPUs, allows realtime compression
and de-compression, so more data
can be pushed down the copper
within every 'clock cycle'. Of course
the end-connected technologies and
applications such as media streaming,
realtime monitoring and database
servers have 'encouraged' active
networking vendors, such as Cisco and
Dynamode to produce gigabit switching
technologies that are able to run
over existing copper systems, notably
Category 5e, even Category 5.

The future
Now that we have discussed the past
and present, what about the future of
copper cabling systems? Will we ever
see the demise of copper, CCA or any
other metallic form of transmission
media? I've no crystal ball, but I'm
confident in one form or another copper
(or metallic at least) will remain the
data cable of choice for the majority
of installers and customers, large or
small. The key to this is the design
characteristics of TCP/IP and the
Ethernet framework as a whole.
Future proofing seems to be the
number one reason that vendors want
to replace existing copper cabling
systems. With the myriad of copper
warranty systems on the market, a large
percentage of these upgrades have
more to do with marketing. Having a
system work 25, 40, even 50 years into
the future? A lot of this is just marketing
waffle in my opinion and not about the
technology behind the cables.

Cabling frequencies will continue
to push the boundaries – MHz, GHz
and beyond. Under 'lab conditions'
copper will be able to support higher
bandwidths and hence higher raw data
speeds, even without compression
techniques being used. However, this
argument alone does not justify a need
to constantly upgrade the cabling
systems. As I have already discussed,
data compression and the use of
silicon-based data checking on the fly
(i.e. checksumming) means that current
and future multi-gigabit switches and
their paired network interface adapters
(NICs) will be able to run at even higher
speeds without (or with very few) TCP
errors and data retries. Similar to the
way in which computer CPUs have
constantly pushed the boundaries
of speed via transistor densities
(remember Moore's law?), the same
can be said for copper systems too. To
me at least, it will come down to data
compression on the end systems.

CCA
Copper has been the number one
choice for the electronics industry for
over 60 years thanks to its excellent
conduction properties, low resistance
(think PoE) and reduced oxidation when
compared to other metal elements.
Due to price fluctuations over the years,
some vendors have either reduced the
ratio of copper in favour of other alloys
or have removed copper altogether in
favour of aluminium, retaining just a
light 'dusting' of copper on the surface
of the conductor.
This has opened up a whole new
can of worms, notably the usage of noncopper systems in Power Over Ethernet
(Po JH\X