Portland, OR.  During last week’s TIA meetings, the TR-42.7 Copper Cabling Subcommittee accepted the concept of adding ISO/IEC Class II cabling performance criteria into its pending ANSI/TIA‑568‑C.2-1 category 8 project.  The Subcommittee also agreed to create a task group, which will be co-chaired Brian Celella of Siemon and Frank Straka of Panduit, to work on developing this criteria.

Here are answers to some common questions concerning this exciting new initiative.

What is ISO/IEC Class II cabling?  Class II is the name of the new ISO/IEC grade of cabling that will be constructed from fully-shielded ISO/IEC category 8.2 cords, cables, and connecting hardware.   Both class II and category 8.2 specifications are targeted to support the 40GBASE-T application over a distance of at least 30m and are under development by the ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 25/WG 3 Working Group.  Category 8.2 components will be an extension and superset of existing category 7_A components.

What connector interface will support this new TIA cabling?  The connecting hardware interface to support this new level of cabling has not yet been specified by TIA.  However, it is the opinion of the cabling experts at Siemon that the 8-position RJ-45 modular interface does not exhibit sufficient performance margin to support new requirements based upon ISO/IEC class II cabling.  Fully-shielded balanced twisted-pair connecting hardware characterized to 2 GHz, such as the IEC 61076-3-104 (e.g. Siemon TERA®) interface that is already standardized by ISO/IEC, would be ideal to support this new TIA level of cabling.

What are the implications of this new TIA initiative?  By accepting the concept of adding class II performance criteria and creating a task group to work on these limits, TIA is demonstrating that North American standards development organizations are ready to embrace fully-shielded cabling systems.  This is a strong and positive step towards global harmonization of the full suite of available IT network structured cabling solutions.