GOVERNMENT

Launched in January 2003, Siemon's 10G ip? structured cabling system was the first telecommunications cabling solution guaranteed to support operation of the pending IEEE 802.3an 10GBASE-T application. Today, more than 1,000,000 Siemon 10G-Ready copper ports have been installed, including more than 500,000 UTP ports and over 500,000 combined screened (F/UTP) and fully-shielded (S/FTP) ports, making Siemon the most widely-used 10G copper cabling solution in the world. This milestone underscores the growing market trend towards 10 Gigabit-capable solutions, as illustrated by fiber LAN switch market figures. In fact, the IEEE 802.3an standard outlining 10 Gigabit transmission over copper cabling is on track to publish in July 2006. It is anticipated that the commercial availability of 10GBASE-T equipment will reach the current affordability and availability of 1000BASE-T by January 2008 at about 1/3 the current cost of a 10G fiber port. While 10 Gigabit technology is increasingly embraced by standards organizations, 10 Gigabit-ready cabling also enjoys growing adoption in the end-user market. With over a million ports installed, Siemon's 10G ip solution is a prime example of this trend. There is a growing list of enterprises, including many Global 500 companies that see the benefits of installing 10 Gigabit-ready cabling today. The predominant reason is assuring longevity of the cable plant. With industry specifications such as the new TIA 942 Data Center Standard recommending infrastructure designs capable of accommodating growth without the need to revisit horizontal cabling, 10G ip cabling is the perfect solution. The trend towards planning for 10GBASE-T in the horizontal cabling infrastructure is also being driven by initiatives requiring the handling of extremely large files at the desktop. Today, even the information on the memory card for a typical digital camera can be 1 Gigabyte in size. With application sizes doubling every 18 months according to Gate's Law and the associated file sizes growing at nearly the same rate as dictated by Parkinson's Law, end-users are often finding data transfer times unacceptably slow on networks running at less than 1 Gb/s. Furthermore, standards anticipate that even 1 Gb/s transfer rates will be too slow for typical network traffic within in the next 5 to 10 years. Many customers who now specify Siemon's 10G ip solution for new sites similarly installed Siemon's category 6 solution when it was released as the industry's first category 6 cabling system in 1999; years before the category 6 standard was ratified. Those early adopters who chose Siemon's category 6 over lower-performing category 5 or 5e solutions enjoy the performance and longevity benefits of that decision today. These same customers now choose 10G ip over lesser performing cabling as the best solution to maximize the future performance of their new sites. Today's customers make cabling decisions based upon sophisticated return on investment (ROI) and total cost of ownership (TCO) analysis. Using industry-accepted ROI calculation life expectancies of 10 years for the cabling plant, 5 years for network equipment, and 18 months for applications software it is easily demonstrated that installing 10 Gigabit-ready cabling maximizes cabling ROI. With a 10G ip product line that includes UTP, F/UTP and S/FTP, as well as 50 micron multimode and singlemode fiber, Siemon is the only manufacturer with over 2 years proven experience delivering a comprehensive offering of 10 Gigabit-ready cabling solutions.