Category 5e Cabling to Become Obsolete for Offices

For new office installations, Class E will now become the minimum requirement, with a recommendation to specifiers and customers to deploy Class EA to support applications with alien crosstalk requirements, enabling the smooth migration to 2.5, 5 and ulti

Asignificant change is on the way in how office buildings are cabled. Category 5e cabling, which is used in many offices around the world, will be considered obsolete for new installations following a decision in January 2016 by the ISO/ IEC cabling standards body.

After careful consideration of technology trends, wired and wireless bandwidth requirements and current market demand for the various cabling types, the ISO/IEC Working Group (JTC1/SC25 WG3) responsible for the development of the 11801 standard, recently decided to upgrade the minimum recommendation for the horizontal cabling in offices.

At the recent working group meeting in Milan, Italy, the group agreed to raise the minimum horizontal cabling requirement stated in ISO/IEC 11801-2 for offices (expected publication on or before 2017) from Class D (Category 5e) to Class E (Category 6), with a recommendation for Class EA (Category 6A) or better cabling. Class D cabling is still the minimum requirement in the drafts of 11801-3 (industrial) and 11801-4 (single-tenant homes), but upgrades may be considered in the near future. In the drafts of 11801-5 (data centers) and 11801-6 (distributed services), the minimum requirement is already Class EA cabling. For new office installations, Class E will now become the minimum requirement, with a recommendation to specifiers and customers to deploy Class EA to support applications with alien crosstalk requirements, enabling the smooth migration to 2.5, 5 and ultimately 10 Gb/s.

Published more than 20 years ago, the ISO/IEC 11801 standard was the first international standard for cabling in commercial buildings and helped pave