At the BICSI Fall Conference and Exhibition, held in late August, Siemon demonstrated operation of 10Base-T1L Single Pair Ethernet (SPE) over 400 meters of TERA balanced twisted-pair copper cabling. The company said its demonstration was the first to be run over 23-AWG, category-style cabling.
“Siemon’s fully shielded TERA SPE solution is the first 23-AWG balanced twisted-pair copper cabling system proven to support 10Base-T1L over distances of up to 400 meters [1,300 feet] for operational technology [OT] and 10-Mbit/sec enterprise IT applications,” the company said when announcing its successful demonstration. “This is a milestone step in confirming SPE’s ability to bring Ethernet network compatibility, including operation over a standardized, non-proprietary cabling infrastructure, to a wide range of OT devices operating at 10 Mbits/sec or less such as sensors, actuators, and relays commonly used in building automation and industrial applications.”
In Siemon’s demonstration, SPE was deployed to administer a basic access control system consisting of magnetic door locks responding to inputs from localized inputs like card readers and remotely managed control functions. Because SPE-enabled end-device and system development is in the pre-market stage, media conversion boards supplied by Analog Devices Inc. were used in the evaluation to convert controller and end device 10Base-T TCP/IP output signals to 10Base-T1L. SPE system operation was successfully demonstrated over 400 meters of a one-pair channel constructed from Siemon Category 7A cable and four Siemon TERA connectors. All Siemon connectors, cords, and cables in the SPE channel are commercially available with an installed base of millions of connections.
“It’s easy to specify new TERA permanent links that are capable of supporting both future IT and OT device connections over 400-meter distances,” said John Siemon, chief technology officer and vice president of operations for Siemon. “Because the Siemon TERA SPE cabling system is fully shielded, it has the advantage of supporting up to four unique SPE applications and controllers over a single 4-pair standards-compliant structured cabling channel—an ability that’s referred to as ‘cable sharing.’ Cable sharing saves material cost and more-efficiently utilizes pathway space compared to deploying four SPE applications over four individual one-pair cables.”
Siemon offers a Single Pair Ethernet resource site here.
The video below provides a detailed overview of the demonstration and SPE.