BT sparks Cat 6 cable chaos

BT has sparked a fierce row among cabling experts last week after it told Network News that Category 6 cabling could deliver lower data throughput than Category 5.

BT has sparked a fierce row among cabling experts last week after it told Network News that Category 6 cabling could deliver lower data throughput than Category 5.

The cabling industry has increasingly been promoting Cat 6 copper cabling as the logical upgrade for existing Cat 5 infrastructures. However, the IEEE standard for Cat 6 is not expected until at least 2001 because of long-running technical disputes.

Kevin Sollis, from BT's business information systems division, warned that the lack of a ratified standard could mean that network managers who replace Cat 5 with non-standard Cat 6 could see data throughput rates fall. "Even after more than a year the Cat 6 standard is still very much unresolved. This could lead to potential drops in performance if users mix cabling hardware supplied by different manufacturers," he said.

Steve Broadhead, director at analyst NSS, said: "It's been three years since the first debates began on Cat 6. If I was installing Gigabit Ethernet and wanted to be sure it would work I would do it over fibre, but at least with Cat5e the ratified standard is already there."

Even Cat 6 vendors admit that it is more difficult to install than Cat 5. Pete Kite, installation director for cabling integrators Mitech, said: "Cat 6 cabling has only half the headroom that Cat 5 has, which is not a lot to play around with."

Broadhead also warned that in the early days of Cat 5 cabling that: "dodgy testing equipment gave false impressions of performance and compliance with the standard".