Report: 82% of end users will specify Cat 6 next time

Avaya Inc. (www.avaya.com) announced that the company's own research shows 82% of enterprise network decision makers surveyed will specify Category 6 cabling in their next installation.

The report, "Cabling Infrastructure: Ready for Tomorrow's Network Traffic or Heading for Congestion," surveyed more than 2,000 organizations in 38 countries, spanning organizations with between 50 and 10,000 network users. The report found that 28% of the sample have already installed Category 6.

"Cabling that meets Category 6 standards gives businesses the infrastructure performance they need to increase productivity through greater use of networked systems," the company said in a release announcing the survey results. "It enables the reliable, high-speed communication essential to handle the extra traffic generated by greater use of networked, productivity-enhancing software."

Avaya says this extra performance is of particular value with applications such as video and Voice over IP, which demand support of 1 Gbit/sec transmission. The company added that its research shows 19% of respondents were already using videoconferencing and 27% intend to increase their use of multimedia video applications, including videoconferencing.

The research also showed that network downtime, together with moves, adds, and changes, is costing businesses millions of dollars in lost productivity. From research data, Avaya estimates that downtime is costing companies with more than 7,500 network users an average of $5.5 million annually in lost employee productivity.

Network downtime was cited as the issue of greatest concern more often than any other; 26% of respondents said downtime was the most likely network issue to keep them awake at night, and another 15% said degraded network performance was their biggest worry.

"Network downtime experienced by users of Category 6 cabling was less than among users of Category 5 and 5e solutions," Avaya says. "Among the global sample, only 8% of Category 6 users experience more than five hours of downtime a month-compared with 11% among users of Category 5 and 5e."

"Respondents who said downtime had a major impact on productivity were the most likely to be deploying fast networking technology in the horizontal, but their deployment of Category 6 cabling was only marginally above the average for all respondents," said Dennis Curtis, vice president and general manager of Avaya Connectivity Solutions. "As a result, when traffic levels grow, some of these organiations may find their cabling has too little headroom to avoid long wait times and poor streaming media quality when traffic peaks."

Thirty-eight percent of respondents put product quality at the top of their list of priorities-twice as many as the next commonly named criterion, technical performance.

Avaya's research also included network protocols in deployment and planned for deployment. "Gigabit Ethernet is now used by 31% of respondents in the LAN horizontal," Avaya says. "Within five years, 73% anticipated using this 1-Gbit/sec technology. Notably, 26% of respondents expected to adopt even faster 10-Gbit/sec connections in horizontal applications, indicating a very high demand for speed and reliability in network infrastructures.

"In the backbone, the shift to 10-Gbit/sec technology has already begun," Avaya continues. "Currently 7.2% of the global sample said they were using 10 Gigabit Ethernet, and 4.4% said they were using 10-Gbit/sec laser-optimized multimode fiber cabling in the backbone. Rapid acceleration in the use of 10 Gbits/sec in the backbone is anticipated in the next five years, with 59% of respondents expecting to deploy it in their backbone by then."

Avaya further reports that despite the high proportion intending to adopt 10-Gbit/sec technology in the backbone, only 21% were aware that new standards for 10-Gbit/sec laser-optimized multimode fiber had been ratified.

"Low awareness of the new fiber standards suggests some managers lack the information they need to make the right decisions in this area," Curtis said.