ANSI/TIA 568-C, A New Family of Cabling StandardsANSI/TIA 568-C, A New Family of Cabling Standards

Get ready for the next generation of cabling standards.

Get ready for the next generation of cabling standards, 568-C. Every five years, the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) requires subcommittees that are responsible for publishing standards to reaffirm, revise, or rescind their documents. A well written description of the 568-C standard, "The 568-C Family of Standards: An Update and an Overview" is available from Siemon.In 1991, ANSI/TIA/EIA released the standard ANSI/TIA/EIA-568 "Commercial Building Telecommunications Cabling Standard." ANSI/TIA/EIA released 568-A in 1995 to be up-to-date with the market trends and to ensure that network infrastructures would be compatible with the latest network electronics. The 568-A standard was replaced by ANSI/TIA/EIA-568-B in 2001. In February 2009, another set of documents was released, ANSI/TIA-568-C.

The regular updating of the 568 standard by ANSI/TIA delivers to manufacturers an up-to-date benchmark for producing products. The standards also provide buyers with a quantifiable measurement mechanism (test parameters) that can be used to compare products and make informed decisions relating to their network infrastructure implementations.

A major change in the release of 568-C was to divide the standard into four documents. The three 568-B documents and 18 addenda have been incorporated in 568-C. This publication of the standard expands the coverage of cabling for previously unsupported situations such as non office areas. A copy of the new standards can be obtained from the IHS Standards Store.

The four standard documents cover:

ANSI/TIA-568-C.0, "Generic Telecommunications Cabling for Customer Premises", released in 2009:

* Generic terminology for describing cabling segments and connection points * Category 6A has been added * Optical fiber link test requirements are now part of this document * Optical fiber link performance requirements are now part of this document * The UTP and F/UTP installation bend radius requirement for cables has been modified to "4x cable outer diameter" * The patch cord bend radius requirement has changed to "1x cable outer diameter" to allow larger cable diameters * Text has been added for recognizing the need to conserve fossil fuels and support sustainable environments

ANSI/TIA-568-C.1, "Commercial Building Telecommunications Cabling Standard", released in 2009:

* Category 6A has been added * When multimode optical fiber is used for backbone cabling, then 850nm laser-optimized 50/125µm optical fiber is recommended * Category 5, 150 Ohm STP, and 50 Ohm and 75 Ohm coaxial cabling are no longer on the list of recognized media

ANSI/TIA-568-C.2, "Balanced Twisted-Pair Telecommunication Cabling and Components Standard", released in August 2009:

* Category 5e cabling is recommended for support of 100 MHz transmission * An annex for Category 5 channel performance values has been preserved * Balanced twisted-pair channel and permanent performance requirements are now part of this document * Performance equations are listed in a single table for all categories for individual transmission parameters * Coupling attenuation has been introduced as a parameter * A single laboratory test method is defined for all categories of connecting hardware * Thirteen annexes are part of the document

ANSI/TIA-568-C.3, "Optical Fiber Cabling Components Standard", released in 2008, correction issued in October 2008:

* ISO nomenclature for optical fiber cable type has been added to transmission performance tables * When color is used to identify fiber type, recommended connector housing, strain relief and adapter color coding has been added * The minimum OFL bandwidth for 62.5/125 mm optical fiber cable has been increased from 160 MHz*km at 850 nm to 200 MHz*km at 850 nm.

As with any standard, reading it can put you to sleep, no prescription required. What you may miss is some of the terminology differences in the standard documents when comparing 568-C.0 and 568-C.1 functional elements. Here is an example of the naming differences for the cabling levels:

The two diagrams of these functional elements look identical but the names are different. The individual elements, boxes in the diagrams, also have different names. 568-C.0 terminology is to be used only when a customer premise standard does not exist. Expect there will be some resistance and caution when these types of standards changes are issued. Check with RCDDs and cabling professional about their knowledge and experience with the updated 568-C standards when implementing the new standard.Get ready for the next generation of cabling standards.