As the new 802.11 ac Wave 2 products are knocking on the door of the wireless industry, it caused a confusion on how the typical network infrastructure of Ethernet switches supporting 1 Gbps of traffic on ports going to cope with the overwhelming super-fast data rates of Wave 2 products (up to 7 Gbps). The other major problem which kicks in is that nearly 46% of the cabling in the enterprises are CAT5e standard which currently support upto 1 Gbps speed up to 100 meters. These all issues leads to a bottleneck situation which will be created on the wired side of the network.To prevent this situation the only possible way is to replace the old switches and upgrade the cabling infrastructure to CAT6a standard which will definitely be an expensive affair for the companies. To bail out industry from these problems, some of the key players from the networking industry came together and created an organization in Oct 2014 with the name of NBase-T Alliance and came up with NBase-T technology specification.
The NBase-T technology leverages the specifications related to Physical layer implementation, PHY-MAC characteristics and signaling to enable CAT5e and CAT 6 cable to support the speeds of 2.5 Gbps and 5Gbps in conjunction with Cisco Multigigabit Switches up to 100 meters. It also enable switch port to support POE, POE+ and UPOE. This means if a Network Manager already have Cisco switch running such as Cisco 3850 or 4500E, he has to just install new card supporting MultiGigabit on the switch and plug in the existing CAT5e/CAT 6 cable.
In my opinion, with the advent of every technology, comes necessity and challenges which often act as a driver to the innovation of new technologies and creating opportunities to explore new business markets. As the current Wifi technologies moving in a fast pace towards future standards such as 802.11 ad, 802.11 ax, it is imperative for us to cater the Exabyte of data which will be bursting in few years from now by developing smart solutions.