NBASE-T Alliance Membership Continues to Expand
By Phil Delansay, Chair of the Marketing Working Group, NBASE-T Alliance and Co-founder/Sr. VP of Business Development, Aquantia
The NBASE-T Alliance continues to garner support from critical enterprise infrastructure suppliers, expanding its list of participants to include six new companies. This brings the total number of participants to 22, and adds connector suppliers to the alliance’s rapidly expanding ecosystem – an ecosystem that already includes suppliers of access points, Ethernet switching, and computing, as well as suppliers of the semiconductor components required to deliver these applications including physical layer ICs (PHYs), processors, controllers, switches, FPGAs and Power-over-Ethernet ICs.
One of the industry’s leading fabless semiconductor companies, Marvell, has joined at the highest participant level as a promoter. Promoter members can participate in all alliance activities, including specification approval. Other promoter-level participants with voting rights include bellwether companies Aquantia, Cisco, Freescale, Intel, Qualcomm and Xilinx.
Molex, well-known for its connectors and interconnect solutions, and Bel Magnetic Solutions, a provider of magnetic-based solutions for high-speed networking and computer applications, have joined at the contributor level. In addition to gaining access to NBASE-T specifications, contributors can also chair and participate in working groups. These groups today include the Technical Working Group and the Marketing Working Group.
Well-known FPGA supplier Altera, popular connector manufacturer KinnexA and interconnect component supplier Pulse Electronicshave joined as adopters, giving them the ability to access and deploy products based on NBASE-T specifications.
The alliance recently adopted the NBASE-T 1.0 specification. PHY products compatible with this version of the specification are already shipping, and system-level products have been recently announced and demonstrated at a major vendor show.
The alliance was formed in 2014 as a non-profit organization to facilitate the deployment of NBASE-T products and technology, and has defined and published a specification that enables 2.5 and 5 Gigabits per second speeds over 100m of Cat 5e cable. The speed boost enables enterprise users to improve network performance without having to rip and replace their existing cables.
Our expanding list of participants ensures broad industry collaboration and the delivery of compatible products and technologies that increase enterprise network speeds in the most cost-effective, least-disruptive manner. With over 20 participant companies representing the many facets of networking infrastructure, the alliance has the momentum to enable broad deployment of its 2.5GBASE-T and 5GBASE-T technology.
At a recent IEEE meeting in Atlanta, individuals representing several alliance members participated in a Study Group session – the first required phase of the standardization process. To learn more about their progress, please read this alliance blog post.
