Cisco, Aquantia, Freescale and Xilinx have formed the NBASE-T Alliance, an industry-wide cooperative effort to promote the development of 2.5 and 5 Gigabit Ethernet (2.5GE and 5GE) technology for enterprise network infrastructure. The objective of the nonprofit organization is to advance multi-gigabit Ethernet technology that enables faster data rates on existing enterprise cabling originally designed for 1 Gigabit Ethernet (1GbE) technology.
Market trends demand a unified approach to the deployment of faster data rates on twisted-pair copper cables matching the bandwidth increase driven by 802.11ac Wave 2 Access Points (APs) and other technologies, such as 802.11ad, 802.11ax and LiFi.
In most enterprise campus networks around the world, Category 5e (Cat5e) and Category 6 (Cat6) twisted-pair copper cables are the most common deployed. These cables do not support 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10GbE) up to 100 meters, therefore the need for intermediate rates between 1 and 10 Gigabit has gained support throughout the industry.
Chris Spain, vice president of product management, Cisco
The NBASE-T alliance is addressing one of the top networking challenges of today – speed in the access layer. The industry is moving to the next generation of 802.11ac – Wave 2 with theoretical data rates of up to 6.9 Gbps and actual aggregated bandwidth of up to 5 Gbps; a 1 Gbps link between the access point and switch is not sufficient. Our mission in working with the Alliance members is to provide customers with innovative technology to increase network speed without the need to upgrade the cabling infrastructure.
Nikolay Guenov, director of product marketing, Digital Networking Group, Freescale
Freescale looks forward to collaborating with networking industry leaders to accelerate adoption of multi-gigabit Ethernet technology. Customers using our multicore processors in WiFi access points are exhausting 1GE copper backhaul links and must upgrade to 2.5GE and 5GE to meet their bandwidth requirements.
