Structured Cabling market receives a digital boost

With an improvement in telecom infrastructure and availability of high speed devices and networks, the demand for structured cabling solutions is rising rapidly.

India is on the verge of a huge digital revolution. With an aggressive government pushing projects to strengthen the digital backbone of the country, the market for products that can help create this backbone is also finding huge demand. For example, under the Digital India initiative, the government has planned a project overlay of Rs 1 lakh crore, with an ambitious target of providing broadband connectivity to 2.5 lakh villages.

With an improvement in telecom infrastructure and availability of high speed devices and networks, the demand for structured cabling solutions is rising rapidly. Structured cabling solutions play a vital part in data centers and enterprise telecom networks. Gartner, for instance, predicts that the Indian data center infrastructure market will total $2 billion in 2016, a 5.2 percent increase from 2015. Gartner says that mobile, and the proliferation of data will have a big impact on the supporting infrastructure and operations (I&O) infrastructure. Additionally, with more and more applications getting provisioned and more offices getting connected, there is a huge need for advanced structured cabling solutions which promise better data transmission rates.

Demand surges for pre-terminated solutions

With huge demand for data centers, there has been a corresponding rise in pre-terminated solutions which promise quick installation and reduced time for upgrades. As pre-terminated solutions are modular in nature, they can be quickly installed and scaled as per the business need. In addition, the high density design of pre-terminated solutions ensures reduction in total cost of ownership.

Agrees Gaurav Ahluwalia, Managing Director at R&M India, “This is one of the biggest trends in the structured cabling market. Pre-terminated cabling systems offer a number of advantages for a variety of different network installations, and are particularly suited to data center environments as they can save time, space, and are more energy efficient and secure.” Ahulwalia, however, cautions that a pre-terminated solution needs serious amount of planning, which needs to be carried out prior to installation. Attention to detail in the site survey process and the ensuing plan is critical for the benefits of pre-terminated solutions to be realised.

Energy efficiency and higher bandwidth accelerating adoption of smarter solutions As more data is getting carried over the network, there is an increase in demand for high speed networks, whose backbone is built on efficient structured cabling solutions.

Says Sitaramaiah Alamuri, Managing Director, CommScope Solutions India, “There is an increase in adoption of higher bandwidth switches which are primarily due to high speed applications. We are increasingly seeing deployment of CAT6A to the disk, 40 gig ethernet and escalation of Wi-Fi access points. Wi-Fi networks are getting more business critical among organisations in various verticals. This is leading to more powerful ways of designing the network. “In addition, many organisations are also consolidating their networks, which in turn is driving the growth for advanced structured cabling solutions. CommScope is witnessing huge demand from sectors such as IT and BFSI.

Energy efficiency is a vital component of data center planning, and structured cabling solutions are becoming an integral part of this planning. “With the right network cabling and an intelligent infrastructure management, data centers can cut their network energy needs by as much as 10%. Based on our customers’ experience, up to 40% of all switch ports simply disappear over time because they are forgotten in the documentation or their status is not correctly recorded,” explains Ahluwalia.

IoT is another big trend which is posing as a catalyst of change. Gartner predicts that 30 billion devices will be connected to IP networks by 2020. According to I.H.S. Global/IMS Research, 160,000 new industrial Ethernet nodes are connected every single day. Point-to-point cabling lacks the flexibility, reliability, manageability and performance required for the exploding number of connections within today’s networks. Structured cabling is diligently addressing this issue with steady changes.

jasmine.desai@expressindia.com