Net 10G

As a British based manufacturing company in charge of its own R&D, production and logistics Connectix is well placed to be at the forefront of emerging technologies and has now developed a complete shielded 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10GBASE-T) copper solution, Net 10G, which compliments our existing 10 Gigabit Ethernet fibre optic systems. Together they form a complete package to support the fastest applications today and long into the future.

Why Net 10G?

While 10 Gigabit applications are uncommon in the market today, IT managers and building designers want to specify a cabling system that will support the bandwidth-hungry 10 Gigabit applications of the future. With 10 Gigabit switch-to-switch links becoming ever more common in today’s advanced data centres, specifying Net 10G makes even more sense.

Network infrastructure installations in hi-tech buildings today represent a long term investment. The increased use of data intensive applications, that demand more bandwidth with increased reliability, has driven Ethernet to a new generation.

Net 10G has been designed to provide maximum protection against advancements in the IT industry. 10 Gigabit capacity with minimal increase in investment guarantees Net 10G’s competitive edge.

Copper Systems

The transmission of 10 Gigabit Ethernet over copper requires systems that perform at much higher frequencies than previous applications. While Gigabit Ethernet required cabling specified up to 100 MHz; 10 Gigabit Ethernet requires systems specified up to 500 MHz. At these higher frequencies it is not only the performance within the cable that is relevant but also the interference coming into the cable from outside. This could be from adjacent cables (most likely) or any external source. Interference from outside the cable is classed as Alien Crosstalk (ANEXT) and requires a whole new approach to cable design and testing.

There is a fundamental difference between alien crosstalk and the ‘in-cable’ sources of interference. The effects of insertion loss, return loss, NEXT and FEXT is predictable. These parameters hardly change so the transmitting device can measure these effects itself and make corrections for their damage to the transmitted signal. This ability has a huge effect on the cable to cope with this internally generated noise and still transmit gigabit speed signals. Alien crosstalk is not predictable and so the digital signal processing techniques cannot cancel it out. This is why alien crosstalk has become a significant factor in 10GBASE-T transmission.

If alien crosstalk is a factor then there are only two ways to combat it. The first is a metallic screen around the cable and the second is to arrange significant physical distance from the source of interference.

Screened cables deal with alien crosstalk, and other forms of interference, very well. Unscreened cable however must take the latter route and also use a number of ‘mitigation’ features to assist the solution of the crosstalk issue. For this reason Connectix has opted for a fully shielded solution, increasing signal isolation and preventing contaminant noise from entering the cabling system.

We have approached this tenfold increase in data rates with care knowing that in the field the typical conditions faced by building design engineers and IT managers will be very different to those in the laboratory.