NBASE-T Alliance Expands in Support of 2.5G and 5G Ethernet Standard

NBASE-T Alliance, an industry-wide cooperative effort to promote the development of 2.5 and 5 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) over twisted pair copper cabling (2.5GBASE-T and 5GBASE-T) for enterprise network infrastructure, has announced the broadening of its membership base with the addition of Aruba Networks, Brocade, Cavium, Shenzhen GLGNET Electronics Co., Intel, Microsemi, Qualcomm, Ruckus Wireless, Tehuti Networks and Vitesse.

With these additions, the alliance comprises a broad range of stakeholders that represent all major facets of enterprise networking infrastructure such as access points, Ethernet switching, and computing, as well as the necessary semiconductor components required to deliver these applications including physical layer ICs (PHYs), processors, controllers, switches, FPGAs and Power-over-Ethernet ICs.

As part of their membership, companies gain access to the recently-released NBASE-T 1.0 specification – a specification based on silicon-proven, production-ready devices. In addition, participants have the opportunity to join the alliance’s newly-formed Technical and Marketing working groups.

The Technical Working Group will define a comprehensive end-to-end solution, including additional specifications to address application needs beyond the physical layer. The NBASE-T Alliance and its participant companies are also working closely with IEEE to ensure rapid standardization and drive industry-wide adoption of multi-gigabit rates in enterprise infrastructures.

“Our diverse membership ensures that the broadest range of opinions and perspectives will be reflected when our working groups and task forces gather,” said Peter Jones, Chairman of NBASE-T Alliance. “We believe this level of diversity and collaboration is a requirement when driving new standards and building the product ecosystem required to support them.”

NBASE-T Alliance provides a forum for collaboration in defining a new standard to enable multi-gigabit speeds over existing Cat5e and Cat6 cabling. These cables represent the vast majority of the installed base in enterprise, and do not support 10GbE up to 100m.

As Wave 2 of 802.11ac access points aggregate up to 5Gbps of throughput, a need has emerged for the support of multi-gigabit rates on the existing copper cables that connect these new WiFi access points to campus switches. The emerging standard proposed by the NBASE-T Alliance supports these higher data rate speeds without requiring enterprise customers to engage in the costly upgrade of their wired infrastructure.

NBASE-T Alliance is a group of industry leaders who have joined forces to promote the deployment of multi-Gigabit data rates on legacy cabling such as Cat5e and Cat6, filling the gap between 1GbE, which is insufficient in the wake of 802.11ac multi-gig speeds and 10GbE, which is incapable of running on the majority of installed cables. NBASE-T Alliance founding companies are Cisco, Aquantia, Freescale and Xilinx. The Alliance is incorporated in Delaware as a nonprofit organization.