The Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers, of which I am a member, is completing the specifications for a new ethernet standard, one capable of 10Gbit/second signal speeds utilizing Category 7 cabling and a new type of jack. 10GBaseT is one step ahead of the current Gigabit ethernet that uses the same 8-conductor jack and Category 6 cabling. The most interesting part of this news is that 10GBaseT, to be approved by the IEEE in July, will not use the typical RJ45 connector we’ve all come to love. Instead it will use a radical new connector, the GG45 made by Nexxans, which has 8 conductors at the top and 4 conductors at the bottom of the jack.
The new Nexxans GG45 jack has 4 new pins on the bottom.
However, only 4 of those 8 conductors on the top will be used during 10GBaseT actions, the other 4 are utilized for backwards compatibility with Cat6 cabling. You might be seeing this on your next motherboard. My only concern is that it doesn’t look like the jack will have those two ethernet activity LEDs, as there are now pins in place of them. DailyTech has the rest of the story.
PaulStamatiou.com runs on the Thesis Theme for WordPress
Thesis is the search engine optimized WordPress theme of choice for serious online publishers. If you’re a blogger who doesn’t understand a lot of PHP, Thesis will give a ton of functionality without having to alter any code. For the advanced, Thesis has incredible customization possibilities via Thesis hooks.
With so many design options, you can use the template over and over and never have it look like the same site. The theme is robust and flexible enough not only to accommodate a site like PaulStamatiou.com, but also to enable the site to run far more efficiently than it ever has before.
I used the Scribe WordPress plugin and service to optimize this blog post for SEO.
{ 8 comments… read them below or add one }
I think this is good news for people that push alot of bandwidth
Wires had to catch up sometime. For a while it looked as if the wireless N technology was going to be faster than wired ethernet.
Wireless is the way to go! Once more than just the US has EVDO I think it will be a lot more common for computers to ship with internal cards just like when wireless G networks started popping up. As common as they are in America they do not populate the landscape as much here in the UK. A shame really as we could do with some open hotspots for bit torrenting all day long.
Uh oh! Now that I finally mastered Cat 5e/6 cabling and punch downs, I have to learn a whole new system!
I hope Cat 7 is easier than 6 though, because I hate that middle plastic piece, so hard to manipulate into the RJ-45 module. Category 5e is so much more malleable makes my life here in the office so much easier.
@Tommy – just a clarification from another country – many other countries have EVDO and have had for quite a while, and we have countries already looking at 3.5G. 3-4mbps bursting and 512kbps steady is quite common. ;-)
As a significant contributor to the 802.3an standard, and a member of each of the various balloting groups, I applaud you getting out the word that IEEE is standardizing 10GBASE-T. This standard should be ratified in a few weeks (June 2006). 10GBASE-T will put 10 gigabit ethernet on the same curves that successfully drove ethernet in the past, with 10, 100, and 1000BASE-T. However, you should be aware that 10GBASE-T is being specified to use an RJ-45 connector, and to run on Category 6 (up to 55m), and up to 100m on both the new Category 6a (an unshielded cable, modifying category 6 to have reduced cabling crosstalk) and Category 7 cabling.
TIA TR42.7 is currently balloting the cabling standards for qualifying installed cabling, as well as the new Category 6a cabling. Several cabling vendors are already selling “proposed Category 6a” cabling in advance of the TIA standard, which meets the link requirements specified by both IEEE and the TIA drafts.
I would like the IEEE to rename that new connector above
to XG45, using Roman Numeral “X” for 10, and the IT stnadard lingo letter “G” for gig. It makes more sense, since “GG” implies a gig times a gig = 1 terabit.
jonathan cat 7 cable has indiviidual shielded pair as well as the whole cable been shielded its a FTP/STP cable