Member Spotlight: CommScope
Following is an interview with Dave Tanis, Strategic Marketing Director at CommScope, discussing the NBASE-T Alliance and technology.
What was the motivation for joining the NBASE-T Alliance℠?
As a leading provider of network infrastructure solutions, we are committed to ensuring our customers get the most value out of their cabling investment. NBASE-T™ technology clearly helps to ensure they do just that. As part of the NBASE-T Alliance, we will endeavor to make recommendations to our customers around the deployment of NBASE-T technology over existing cabling, as well as recommendations for deploying cabling for new builds.
How do you see the roll out of NBASE-T solutions to your customers?
CommScope has seen wide-scale deployment of Wi-Fi across our customer base with plans to adopt the Wave 2 802.11ac wireless networking standard. NBASE-T solutions will ease the traffic bottleneck between wireless access points (WAPs) and switches, and we believe this technology will help pave the way for additional applications in buildings requiring more than 1 Gb/s. These applications further emphasize the importance and value of the copper cabling infrastructure.
What products can you discuss publicly today?
CommScope offers a comprehensive portfolio of structured copper cabling solutions that address the bandwidth requirements of the NBASE-T specification, as well as other enterprise applications. Additionally, we offer an Automated Infrastructure Management (AIM) solution – known as imVision® – which fully manages the physical layer. We see this as a valuable tool for provisioning and documenting NBASE-T links.
How will CommScope’s solutions be deployed in an NBASE-T network?
As a provider of network cabling solutions, we deliver infrastructure that supports legacy, emerging (such as NBASE-T) and future high speed applications when the cabling is listed as the supporting media by application standards. For those emerging multi-rate switches that have the ability to support 10GBASE-T, we anticipate new builds to be deployed with Category 6A cabling to match the full capabilities of the transmission and switching infrastructure.
What is your company’s role in IEEE standardization of NBASE-T?
CommScope directly supports and provides input to the IEEE 802.3bz Task Force and other IEEE 802.3 task forces, as well as the relevant cabling standards groups within TIA, ISO/IEC and CENELEC.
What trends do you see in the deployment of NBASE-T technology?
We have seen a significant trend in the enterprise building where an increasing number of applications have migrated to structured copper cabling such as: LED lighting, IP Security, Audiovisual and more. NBASE-T provides significant additional flexibility and allows enterprise IT managers to get more value out of their structured copper cabling network.
What do your customers tell you about NBASE-T technology and/or their need for improved performance without upgrading cabling?
We see this as a large market opportunity for both support of existing installations and new cabling opportunities. With growth in commercial construction and new builds, we expect this to be a significant opportunity.
