Olindo Savi, Technical Program Manager, The Siemon Company
Lee Harrison, Vice President of Operations, Keyeye Communications
Yue Xu, Senior Signal Integrity Engineer, Keyeye Communications

Market research reports show a continuing increase in Internet traffic. The need for increased bandwidth at the physical layer is being driven by new bandwidth-intensive applications coupled with the growth of on-line users. Technologies have emerged in various application spaces (i.e., Infiniband, 10GBASE-CX4, 10GBASE-T) to address this demand.

A key critical factor at the physical layer is the selection of the cabling media to support the transmission of data. One such cabling media type is Class FA (Category 7) cabling. An overview of class FA cabling media will be provided. The overview will include an emphasis on cabling media characteristics, electrical performance, cost, and achievable theoretical Shannon capacity targets. A technical overview will be provided that will explain the benefits of Class FA cabling as an interconnect solution to support high-speed data rates.