What is Structured Cabling?

Structured cabling is a 'standards' based method of engineering and installing an integrated data, voice and video cabling system for your business. A properly designed and installed structured cabling system provides you with a cabling infrastructure that delivers predictable performance as well as flexibility to accommodate growth and change over an extended period of time. Additionally, a structured cabling system provides a uniform, open physical cabling topology that can simultaneously support multiple logical networking topologies for different applications such as Ethernet, token-ring, ATM or video.

Category 5 recommendations were developed in the early 1990’s to define the use of low cost Unshielded Twisted Pair (UTP) cabling and components in a structured cabling system with performance parameters specified up to 100 MHz.

Category 5e specifications, also referred to as Enhanced Category 5, were developed at the end of the ’90s to meet the demands of more sophisticated networking applications such as Gigabit Ethernet and to take advantage of significant advances in UTP cabling system engineering and manufacturing technologies. Today, the Category 5e standard is generally accepted as the minimum requirement for data applications in new cabling system installations, and it is anticipated that most standards organizations will recommend the use of the Category 5 standard in lieu of all earlier standards for voice networking applications.

Current Category 6 define channel bandwidth at 200 MHz or greater, providing at least twice the bandwidth of Category 5e systems

Currently there is no industry standard beyond Category 6 cabling, however a number of technologies supporting 10Gibabit throughput are available from the industries technology leaders.