The NBASE-T Alliance, a cooperative effort to promote the development of 2.5 and 5 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) over twisted pair copper cabling (2.5GBASE-T and 5GBASE-T), today announced the broadening of its membership base with the addition of big names such as Intel, Qualcomm and Brocade. The group was founded just seven weeks ago by a consortium of four companies: Cisco, Aquantia, Freescale and Xilinx. Aruba Networks, Brocade, Cavium, Centec Networks, CME Consulting, Intel, Microsemi Corp., Qualcomm, Ruckus Wireless, Shenzhen GLGNET Electronics Co., LTD., Tehuti Networks and Vitesse Semiconductor joined the group recently.

With these additions, the alliance comprises a broad range of stakeholders that represent all major facets of enterprise networking infrastructure such as access points, Ethernet switching, and computing, as well as the necessary semiconductor components required to deliver these applications including physical layer ICs (PHYs), processors, controllers, switches, FPGAs and Power-over-Ethernet ICs.

As part of their membership, companies gain access to the recently-released NBASE-T 1.0 specification – a specification based on production-ready devices. In addition, participants have the opportunity to join the alliance’s newly-formed Technical Working Group and Marketing Working Group. The Technical Working Group will define a comprehensive end-to-end solution, including additional specifications to address application needs beyond the physical layer. The NBASE-T Alliance and its participant companies are also working with IEEE to ensure rapid standardization and drive industry-wide adoption of multi-gigabit rates in enterprise infrastructures.

NBASE-T Alliance provides a forum for collaboration in defining a new standard to enable multi-gigabit speeds over existing Cat5e and Cat6 cabling. These cables represent the vast majority of the installed base in enterprise, and do not support 10 Gbps up to 100m. As Wave 2 of 802.11ac access points aggregate up to 5Gbps of throughput, a need has emerged for the support of multi-gigabit rates on the existing copper cables that connect these new WiFi access points to campus switches. The emerging standard proposed by the NBASE-T Alliance supports these higher data rate speeds without requiring enterprise customers to engage in the costly upgrade of their wired infrastructure.