One of the more significant outcomes of the meeting of the Telecommunications Industry Association’s TR-42 Engineering Committee back in January 2016 was the announcement of the Category 8 cable standards.
Category 8 is the next generation twisted-pair copper cabling specification that is still being finalized (as of February 2016), featuring two conductor pairs with maximum signal rates at 2GHz (2000 MHz) – four times the Cat6a cable bandwidth of 500MHz!!!
Class I, Class II and Category 8 cabling is characterized to 2000 MHz and intended to support up to 30 meter long cabling channels consisted of two connectors. These channels and the emerging 25/40GBase-T applications that they support are specifically tailored for deployment at the data centers, where bandwidth intensive server-to-switch connections are made.
The preliminary tests of Cat8 cable have shown it meets connectivity performance standards found in the draft 2.0E of the TIA-568-C.2-1 Category 8 proposed standard and can support the operation of IEEE 802.3bq 25G/40GBASE-T applications up to 30 meters.
So how did the 30 meters maximum supported cabling channel length come about?
One of the shortcomings of 10 GBase-T standard has been high power consumption resulting in increased heat dissipation issues produced by the equipment. In order to address this problem the Telecommunication Industry (TIA), the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) have collectively concluded to reduce the maximum channel length to 30 meters in order to make sure that the power footprint for 25 GBase- T and 40 GBase- T chipsets is reduced and kept at minimum.
How is the emergence of Cat 8 cabling going to impact installations of Cat6 cabling and wider adoption of Cat7/Cat7a cabling systems?
While Cat 7e connectors available on the market today are capable achieving Class II speeds and performance Cat7 standard is not widely adopted today, even at the data center deployments.
Given the early stages of the new cabling specifications, we don’t anticipate the arrival of Cat 8 standards to have significant impact on and changing the landscape of available high speed cabling solutions.
From our perspective Cat5e and Cat6 cabling solutions sufficiently support the bandwidth requirements of today’s data centers, gigabit networks and end consumers.
Table below illustrates comparison of features, similarities and differences between Cat5e, Cat6/Cat6e, Cat7/Cat7a and Cat8 Cable specifications
| Feature | Category 5e Cable | Category 6 Cable | Category 6a Cable | Category 7/7a Cable | Category 8 Cable |
| Maximum Data Rate/ Signal | 1000 Base T/Gigabit Ethernet | 1000 Base T/Gigabit Ethernet | 10 GBase- T | 10 GBase- T | 25 GBase- T, 40 GBase- T |
| Maximum Distance | 100 meters | 100 meters | 100 meters | 100 meters | 30 meters |
| Frequency | 100 MHz | 250 MHz | 500 MHz | 1000 MHz | 2000 MHz |
| Conductor Pairs | 4 | 4 | 4 | 4 | 2 |
| Cable Type | Shielded / UTP | Shielded / UTP | Shielded / UTP | Shielded | Shielded |
| Connector Type | RJ45 | RJ45 | RJ45 | GG45, TERA | Class I: RJ45, Class II: Non-RJ45 |
| Use Cases | Small office, home office | Large enterprise, high speed applications | Large enterprise, high speed applications | Data center backbone, high speed and bandwidth intensive applications | Data center architecture, server-to-switch links |
This table is for informational purposes only and is subject to change without notice. We make no guarantees, either expressed or implied, concerning the accuracy, completeness or reliability of the information found in this table especially that the specifications of Cat8 cable haven’t been finalized yet.