The mainstream adoption of Gigabit Ethernet (1000BASE-T) required a new industry-standard cable. The cable needed to be capable of transmitting at a higher frequency of 250 MHz. As a result, cable manufacturers introduced CAT6. The CAT6 cable uses a thicker-gauge wire and has an increased shielding. Also, the wires have more twists per inch. These improvements helped to reduce signal loss and interference. The tighter specifications guaranteed that 100-meter runs using CAT6 cable is capable of 1000 Mbit/s transfer speeds. Also, CAT6 cable can reach 10-Gigabit Ethernet speeds by reducing the length to less than 50 meters. After introducing CAT6, ICC made enhancements and produced CAT6e.

That’s not necessarily true, if you consider that Category 6A was developed to support 10Gbps Ethernet, whereas Category 6 supports up to 1Gbps Ethernet. Therefore, the right question to ask is, “When are we implementing 10G over copper in our data center? In 3 to 5 years? What about our commercial buildings? In 5 to 7 years?”

So, if installing Cat 6 today, we might face in the future an additional investment to migrate to Cat 6A, hence, the total investment is greater than installing Cat 6A today

Category 6A it enables higher speeds, greater bandwidth and a longer lifecycle, and so the material costs are higher than Category 6.

But a way of understanding the investment is to look at the whole picture. If we design the same raceways/ducts for Cat. 6 and 6A (foresight!) and, as we know, implementation costs are the same, the difference between Cat. 6 and Cat. 6A projects becomes smaller.

Another point to be considered is the hidden costs of some Category 6A solutions. For example, whether they support cable lengths shorter than 15 meters (less cable to be purchased); whether they support short patch cords (for example, at least 1 or 2 meters); and how many cables cable managers can accommodate (the smaller the cable managers, the lower the costs).