EoW November 2008

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EuroWire – November 2008 46
english technology news
Martin Rossbach, director of product management and new market
development at Nexans Cabling Solutions, looks at a current
industry dilemma.
Cabling and Ethernet standards have rarely been controversial.
When the industry in general has had its fair share of standards
wars, there have been fewer debates around the progression
from Cat3 to Cat5 and Cat 5e, or from Ethernet to Fast Ethernet to
Gigabit Ethernet. Now the industry is being tested because it is
caught between two trends: the desire for more – 40G and 100G
Ethernet – and less, as developments in green computing drive
innovation in Energy Efficient Ethernet for the first time.
What this means is that whether in the data centre or the
network, purchasers of infrastructure are making important,
far-reaching decisions that they may regret if they get them
wrong.
Everywhere we look, demand is mushrooming. An example:
global subscriber access traffic shows growth that, if we assume
50 million IPTV subscribers in 2011, IPTV will consume more
bandwidth than internet and phone traffic combined. Put all
three together and by 2011 that’s traffic of almost 300 million
Terabytes every year, five times the volume in 2007.
At the server level, demand will continue to grow. Intel and
Broadcom show figures of x86 server units at fewer than 10
million in 2008, almost all of which use Gigabit Ethernet. By
2015 those numbers will have doubled, and the overwhelming
networking technology is 10G Ethernet, with the rest 100G.
That timescale is well within the lifespan of today’s cabling,
and that means that anyone installing cabling today has to be
mindful of the way the data centre will evolve. The demands
of 10G Ethernet dictate Cat6A cabling as a practical minimum
standard, but in the world of 10G Ethernet, that cabling will need
to be put in before we settle on the likely dominant technology.
While there’s an overwhelming desire to see the 10G Base-T
standard ratified, it’s not a success. The complexity of the project
has created what is probably the most power-consuming chipset
ever created. In an era when the wasteful power consumption
of IT is being questioned – IEEE calculates that the total energy
consumption of network equipment is 13 terawatt hours per
year – 10GBase-T is not a successful project at the moment.
Out of these technological challenges comes innovation, and
there’s much better progress for the working group on Energy
Efficient Ethernet (EEE). What would have been seen as a pointless
exercise a few years ago is now an exciting area of innovation: by
stepping down the power consumption of the chip set during
its idle time – most of the time it is in operation – it can reduce
the waste of energy. In simple terms, if the chipset is idle 90% of
the time, the ability to step down power consumption to 10% or
even 0% will save 90% of the energy supplied.
EEE has the aim of defining a mechanism to reduce consumption
for 100Base-TX, 1000Base-T, 10GBase-T, 10GBase-KR and
10GBase-KX4 among others, and has widespread industry
support.
As we solve one problem another comes racing towards us. Away
from the data centre and copper cabling, we constantly have
to upgrade our own expectations. As service providers begin
to create services to supply IPTV and video on demand to the
home, it stretches the boundaries of what can be supplied over
IP networks. For the home user, 30 minutes of TV uses the same
network capacity as 30 days of Internet surfing. When HDTV and
VoD are the main business driver for service providers, the largest
cable TV supplier in the US, Comcast, predicts that per user traffic
demand, currently 3.5 million, will explode to 19 million in the
HDTV era.
The demand for 40G Ethernet is urgent, and yet the predictions
for the uptake of service show that 40G Ethernet may not
be enough. To satisfy likely user demand in the near future,
service providers will need to provide 100G Ethernet on their
networks. The lesson from this is that whatever the network,
we are at the beginning of an explosion in demand that will
tax our infrastructure, and our ability to ratify standards and
commercialise them, to the limit. For anyone responsible for
specifying and installing infrastructure today, short-termism isn’t
the answer.
Nexans Cabling Solutions – Belgium
Email:
Website:
Nexans has secured an €8.9 million contract from the
Istanbul Transportation Authority (IETT) to provide 988km
of specialised rail cables for an extension of the city’s
Metro and Light Rail systems.
Nexans will supply to Gulermak-Dogus JV, the overall
project contractor, 72km of low voltage and 262km of
medium voltage power cables which will be used for
power distribution and DC systems for a 5.3km Light Rail
Transport (LRT) line and a 15.6km metro line expected to
carry 67,000 passengers an hour.
Nexans, involved in an earlier expansion of the Istanbul
Metro, will also provide lighting cables for use in 20
new stations. All these cables will have a Halogen Free
Flame Retardant (HFFR), sheath, meaning that they are
preventing the propagation of fire, while providing low
toxicity, low corrosivity and low smoke density, thus
reinforcing the safety of people and equipment on board.
The total installation is scheduled for completion by
the end of 2009. All the cables will be manufactured by
Nexans plants in Germany.
Nexans – France
Fax: +33 15669 8484
Email:
Website:
Commuter rail cable contract
for Nexans
The drive for future proof cabling
standards