ISO/IEC Initiates 40 GBit/s Copper Cabling Project

A New Work Item Proposal (NWIP) to develop requirements for balanced twisted-pair cabling capable of supporting 40 GBit/s data transmission  was initiated by ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 25/WG 3 in October, 2011 at the Working Group’s  Melbourne, Australia meeting.  This proposal affirms the international cabling Standards community’s vision of supporting greater than 10 GBit/s Ethernet speeds with copper cabling.

The working title of this new project is expected to be, “ISO/IEC 11801-99-x Guidance for balanced cabling in support of at least 40 GBit/s data transmission” and the scope of work will address capabilities of both existing ISO/IEC 11801 compliant channels and channels with extended and/or enhanced performance characteristics.  These dual scopes will form Part 1 and Part 2 of the project as described below.

Part 1: Specification of the transmission characteristics of channels having at least two ISO/IEC 11801 compliant connections whose worst case length is the maximum practically achievable to support 40 Gbit/s data transmission.

Part 2: Specification of the transmission characteristics of channels consisting of connections exhibiting performance headroom to ISO/IEC 11801 requirements (e.g. higher bandwidth performance and/or improved transmission characteristics).  The transmission characteristics of these channels may be specified at or beyond their current bandwidth, with or without extended limit characterization, for 100 meter or shorter topologies, and with four or fewer connections.

Tutorials on expected channel capacity and anticipated electronics-related signal processing (e.g. noise cancellation) from ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 25/WG 3 experts will help to define the capabilities of existing class E_A and F_A channels under a variety of performance and topology conditions, as well as identify opportunities for specification enhancement.

An important differentiating aspect of this work is that its scope includes new requirements as well as guidelines for existing classes/categories (unlike, a similar project within TIA work that is only focused on requirements for a new category of cabling).   No objectives related to media, bandwidth, compatibility with TIA, or other characteristics have been defined at this time.