ICYMI: Some Attention-Worthy Headlines from 2025
If you haven’t checked out our Most Read Articles of 2025, please take a look. It lists the 10 tutorial-style articles on our website that attracted the most views over the past year. It’s interesting to note that many of the articles are years old; one is literally decades old, indicating that fundamentals never go out of style. Thank you for every visit you made to the Cabling Installation & Maintenance website this year and any year. Your viewership of our information offerings is the reason we’re able to keep doing what we do.
With that in mind, I’m taking this opportunity to recap a handful of items we covered in 2025 that you may not have seen, but I think are worth either a first or a second look.
A Look Inside AI Data Centers
None other than Elon Musk is the origin of two social media posts that attracted attention this year. On July 22 he posted to X 2 photos of cabling within Colossus 2, which is believed to be the facility housing the world’s largest network of NVIDIA graphics processing units (GPUs). By using the term “Cable pr0n” to describe the neatly organized cabling, Musk communicated the primal appeal of neatly organized cabling bundles, while dodging the algorithmic repercussions of using a frowned-upon word on his own social media platform.
A separate X post from Musk walked viewers through Cortex, an AI training computer cluster inside Tesla’s headquarters in Austin, TX. Musk posted that one in the second half of 2024, but it remains popular as an uncommon look inside one of the world’s most sophisticated computing environments.
In the News: An Acquisition and a Juggernaut
We reported two pieces of news from the cabling industry that you may have missed at the time, but that promise to impact your work in the year ahead and beyond.
In August, Amphenol and CommScope announced Amphenol will acquire CommScope’s Cable and Connectivity Solutions (CCS) business for $10.5 billion in a deal that is expected to close in the first half of 2026. The CCS business includes three units: Data Center Connectivity Solutions, Broadband Communications, and Building Connectivity Solutions. The approximately 15,000 employees of the CCS business will move to Amphenol.
Earlier in 2025 Amphenol acquired the Andrew business from CommScope.
We will follow the developments in the acquisition process and report to you when the transaction is complete.
In the first part of 2025, BSRIA released information about the global market for structured cabling in 2024. While the market’s overall growth rate was 10%, the eye-popping number from this report is the data center segment’s 35% growth. Hand-in-hand with that figure is the 27% growth enjoyed by fiber cable and connectivity.
For those who insist that copper cabling is dying (including those who have been saying so for the past 30 years), the copper cabling market grew, albeit marginally, in 2024 as well. BSRIA forecasts that when it summarizes the 2025 global cabling market, it will report that sales of Category 6A have overtake sales of Category 6 for the first time. Stay tuned.
Resources to Keep on Hand
The Telecommunications Industry Association (TIA) delighted many in the structured cabling and information and communications technology (ICT) industry in 2025 when it published TSB-6000 and made the document available for download free of charge.
The TSB’s tables define the maximum supportable distance for a number of applications over different media, including twisted-pair cabling, broadband coaxial, multimode fiber, and singlemode fiber. In the cases of fiber applications, the tables also include the maximum allowable channel attenuation for applications including Ethernet, Fibre Channel, InfiniBand, and PON (Passive Optical Network).
The latest edition of the Fiber Optic Association’s textbook on fiber-optic network design also includes new material covering project management. The decade-old previous edition included information on project management, but the newest edition adds detail about kicking off a project, from concept through planning. The FOA says the newest edition also expands on the project manager role in planning and overseeing the installation of the cable plant. The new book is titled “Fiber Optic Network Design And Project Management.”
The textbook is the basis for the FOA’s CFOS/D (Certified Fiber Optic Specialist/Design) certification courses.
New Products Making a Difference
A few new product introductions gained significant attention and interest in 2025, including FiberTRAX, which its manufacturer Traxyl describes as an efficient and effective alternative to microtrenching. Traxyl says the installation method amounts to painting fiber onto a paved surface.
The company points out that the typical depth of a microtrench cut is between 8 and 27 inches, while the FiberTRAX process etches the surface to a depth between 0.3 and 0.6 inches.
Two small-diameter Category 6A cables released in 2025 made waves in the cabling industry. Belden’s 10GXM13 Category 6A cable is 0.230 inches (5.84 mm) in diameter and employs a filler-free design that simplifies termination.
And Proterial’s latest Category 6A cable, the Cat 6A-RD, is 0.240 inches in diameter. The company points out 20 reels of Cat 6A-RD fit on a single pallet, which is a 67% increase over previous-generation Cat 6A reels.
Taking Copper Beyond 100 Meters
In 2025 the TIA’s TR-42 Engineering Committee took up the task of addressing the installation and use of twisted-pair copper cabling at lengths greater than 100 meters. 100 meters long has been considered a “magic number” by cabling system specifiers, designers, and installers because TIA standards identify a 100-meter maximum channel length for copper systems. Any copper channel exceeding 100 meters, regardless of how well or badly it might work, is not standard-compliant. As a practical matter, some enterprise and campus networks have connectivity needs that demand links greater than 100 meters—for which copper is not a standard-compliant solution, but for which copper is a realistic and reasonable option. As part of its ongoing commitment to addressing the needs of the cabling industry’s user community, the TIA opted to begin a project to address the “copper-beyond-100-meters” situation. The effort ultimately will result in the publication of TSB-5073.
One of the first publicly available documents resulting from this effort is a white paper published in the fall. The paper, available for free download, “provides a high-level overview of the technical considerations, use cases, and performance expectations that will shape the development of TSB-5073,” the TIA said when it published the document.
On the heels of that white paper’s release, we at Cabling Installation & Maintenance interviewed two of the white paper’s authors, as well as the chair of TR-42.7 along with the editor of TSB-5073.
We’ll continue to follow the TIA’s progress on TSB-5073, and provide information we believe will help you in your role as a cabling professional.
Thanks once again for visiting the Cabling Installation & Maintenance website in 2025. We hope we’ve lived up to our goal of providing you wit practical, useful information. And we look forward to what’s coming to the cabling and ICT industries in 2026.