May 25, 2001 Despite its banishment into an annex to the TIA/EIA-568B cabling standard, Category 5 still rules the horizontal, according to a study that Sage Research Inc. (www.sageresearch.com) completed in May. Eighty-seven percent of the 130 end-user organizations that participated in Sage's Web-based survey have some Category 5 cabling in the horizontal. And for the organizations with Category 5, it accounts for more than 70% of their horizontal cabling.
Twenty-seven percent of the organizations studied deploy Category 5E in their horizontal systems. Twenty-four percent have some multimode fiber in the horizontal. Sage reports that the 27% and 24% figures for Category 5E and multimode fiber respectively represent significant growth over previous study results.
The study also revealed that nearly two out of three companies plan to upgrade their cabling infrastructures within the next two years. "With the ever-growing demands being placed on networks, it is not at all surprising that businesses are aggressively planning changes to their cabling infrastructure, both to support new sites and workgroups and to replace existing cabling," said Kathryn Korostoff, Sage's president. And with the TIA recommending Category 5E as the minimum-performance twisted-pair cabling type for new installations, Category 5 may soon lose its firm grip on the horizontal space.