While preparing to write these articles, I usually pick a topic, spend some time gathering my thoughts and then do some research. For the topic of building or premises cabling, I found myself thinking back over the history of how cabling for buildings evolved from telephone wiring to structured cabling for local area networks (LANs) for computers, and then my mind went blank. Has nothing happened in premises cabling in the 21st century?

The 1980s were the gestation period for cabling. It began with networks such as ethernet using coaxial cable for its higher bandwidth and IBM Token Ring on a shielded, twisted-pair cable. The decade ended with the development of technology that allowed a precisely made version of unshielded twisted-pair (UTP) telephone wire to be used as an inexpensive cable for 10 megabit/second (Mb/s) ethernet.

The lives of cats

Cable distributor Anixter Inc., Glenview, Ill., created a lab to test this cable type to designate levels of performance and ensure proper operation with 10 Mb/s ethernet. When the Telecommunications Industry Association (TIA) started working on standardizing structured cabling using UTP cabling, it adopted Anixter’s Levels program to create category-rated cabling. First came Cat 3, the equivalent of Level 3, ignoring earlier levels since networking was moving too fast for any slower cables.

During the early 1990s, TIA moved fast. Cat 4 had the shortest lifetime of a standard on record—ethernet had already moved to 100 Mb/s and needed faster cable, so Cat 5 was created and replaced Cat 4 within about 6 months. Cat 5 had a long life for a technology, almost the entire decade, before an upgrade was needed for Gigabit ethernet at 1 gigabit/second (Gb/s), becoming Cat 5e.

At the same time, 50/125 micron multimode was the only optical fiber needed to meet the demands of premises cabling, showing the bandwidth superiority of optical fiber. Wi-Fi was still too slow to be considered for most office communications. The battle to connect the desktop was between Cat 5 and fiber.

Right at the end of the decade—and the century—the internet really took off, and ethernet took another 10-times jump to 10 Gb/s. Fiber was ready; single-mode fiber had practically infinite bandwidth for premises applications, and multimode fiber was tweaked for higher bandwidth and longer distances, becoming the OM2, OM3 and OM4 grades. Copper struggled for several years, but eventually Cat 6 and Cat 6A managed to catch up.

Meanwhile, Wi-Fi technology was advancing so rapidly that by the mid-2000s, every portable computer could use Wi-Fi, and the cable to the desktop became nearly moot. The fiber versus copper battle was over, and Wi-Fi won. Structured cabling evolved to a high-speed fiber backbone to local switches connecting to wireless access points over Cat 5e or Cat 6.

Wild cards

The copper cabling industry had an advantage—copper was a conductor, capable of carrying power and signal and ideal for connecting Wi-Fi access points. Power over ethernet has kept copper cable relevant to this day, although its usefulness, compared to conventional electrical wiring, has been greatly exaggerated.

Fiber had a wild card, too. Fiber to the home (FTTH), the goal of every telecom company, finally became technically and economically feasible in the early 2000s. The passive optical network (PON) made it possible. PONs allowed one electronic port over one single-mode fiber to connect as many as 32 users at a fraction of the cost of a conventional network. Since then, hundreds of millions of users have been connected on FTTH PON networks, and the enormous volume of components has driven costs down by more than 90%.

The largest user of PONs in the United States, Verizon with its FiOS FTTH network, also made the biggest innovation in premises cabling of the 21st century. They offered several large government accounts an option for LANs, a PON tailored for use inside buildings and campuses. The selling point was the cost—half as much to install and even less to operate than a traditional structured cabling LAN. Convincing traditional LAN users to consider PONs took some time, but government agencies saw the advantages, as did education, hospitality and healthcare providers.

The pandemic caused chaos in the office LAN market as workers abandoned offices to work at home, with many never to return. The booming premises cabling market of 20 years ago is gone, but many of the components remain the same.

Did I forget Cat 8 and OM5 fiber? No, but I chose to ignore them, because that is exactly what users and the market did.

stock.adobe.com / Vectorman2017