Cat 8 Cable – What Does The New Standard Mean to Future Networks?
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.