| Question:Why do I need all the bandwidth of Category 6? As far as I know, there is no application today that requires 250 MHz of bandwidth. |
Answer:
Bandwidth precedes data rates just as highways are constructed before traffic volumes increase. Doubling the bandwidth is like adding twice the number of lanes on a highway. The trends of the past indicate that data rates have been doubling every 18 months.
Current applications running at 1 Gb/s are really pushing the limits of Category 5 cabling. As streaming media applications such as video-on-demand and multi-media become commonplace, the demands for faster data rates will increase and spawn new applications that will benefit from the higher bandwidth offered by Category 6. This is exactly what happened in the early 90’s when the higher bandwidth of Category 5 cabling compared to Category 3 caused most LAN applications to choose the better media to allow simpler, cost effective, higher speed LAN applications, such as 100BASE-TX.
Note: Bandwidth is defined as the highest frequency up to which positive Powersum ACR (Attenuation to Crosstalk Ratio) is greater than zero. It means that the data signal will be higher than the background noise on the cable and there should be no errors in data transmissions due to the structured cabling.
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