A cabling decision should be a 10-year commitment, supporting two to three generations of active equipment. Therefore, closely considering total lifecycle cost is critical, and includes a number of factors:

expected installed lifetime of the cabling plant;
applications that will run on the cabling plant over its useful life;
time frame during which standards, applications and electronics manufacturers will support the cabling plant;
cost of active electronics;
warranty length and covered components (parts, labor, applications);
price as it relates to performance; and
time that the end-user will occupy a facility.

The final cabling choices for the pending 10GBASE-T standard is installed legacy Category 6 with a supported distance up to 55 meters, augmented Category 6 and Category 7/class F, with the latter two supporting a distance up to 100 meters. Category 5e systems, while viable for some users now, will not support 10GBASE-T and thereby are assigned a lifecycle of five years. This is based on the expectation that, in the next five to seven years, Category 5e systems will move to an archive annex in their respective standards documents and will no longer be supported by the active equipment manufacturers. Such was the case with Category 3, 4 and 5 systems.

During the next two to five years, new 10GBASE-T copper electronics are expected to be widely available and a cabling upgrade from 5e to at least augmented Category 6 will be necessary to support 10GBASE-T. Non-augmented Category 6 systems, while they will outlast 5e, are expected to have a lesser seven-year lifecycle than the 10 years projected for augmented Category 6 (CAT 6A) systems capable of supporting 10GBASE-T up to a full 100 meters. Category 7/Class F systems enjoy the longest lifecycle and are expected to support future applications beyond 10GBASE-T, such as 40 Gbps. Based on historically consistent application growth rates, CAT 7/Class F can be safely assigned a 15-year lifetime.

Based on these basic lifecycles, a clearer picture of long-term costs can be seen. When comparing costs for a 24-channel cabling system (components, installation and testing), the annualized cost of ownership for CAT 5e over five years is $733.45. Component cost is based on plenum-rated products at retail costs and labor is a primary cost factor, and, depending on geographic location, will be the single most costly factor over the lifecycle of a cabling plant.

The annualized cost of ownership for other cabling are: CAT 6/Class E UTP, $729.52 over seven years; 10G 6A UTP, $698.62 over 10 years; 10G 6A screened, $789.32 over 10 years; and Class F/CAT 7, $853.41 over 15 years. Based on these basic initial figures alone, the case is largely made for higher-performing systems, but initial costs hardly account for true lifetime costs.

Other cost considerations include remediation costs for bringing lesser-performing systems from todayâ€™s 10/100 applications to 1G through 10G. Remediation costs include labor as well as downtime and lost productivity costs due to testing and/or recabling. Downtime costs are based on national average wages and average lost revenues from published figures based on time down for remediation and testing. Adding labor to test for additional performance parameters or removing non-compliant channels increases the total cost of ownership for the lesser performing systems.

These figures do not include higher overtime rates for working after hours, tracing cables if the labeling and documentation on the system was not maintained, or any costs to replace or run new conduit or drill new cores, as needed, to accommodate the larger-diameter Category 6A or Category 7/class F cables. They also do not account for potential productivity losses due to network capacity issues in lower-performing systems.

All of these figures and comparisons boil down to a simple fact, however: the longer your cabling plant can support your needs without upgrade, replacement or additional testing, the lower the total cost of ownership.

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This article was provided by Carrie Higbie, global network applications market manager at Siemon, Watertown, Conn., and president of the BladeSystems Alliance.