Multigigabit Ethernet

Multigigabit Ethernet

| Pushing past gigabit speeds

| Reuse existing cabling

| Standards based

Cisco Meraki switches deliver fast, dependable performance to organizations large and small. Multigigabit performance is a breakthrough technology, finally breaking the 1Gb/s barrier over existing cable infrastructure for the most demanding environments.

Pushing past gigabit speeds

Gigabit connections have served us well for many years, delivering fast low-latency data to the PCs, phones and other devices sitting on our desks. With rapid advances in wireless technology, the latest generation of Access Points can overwhelm a 1Gb/s connection so that the wired network becomes a performance bottleneck. With the continuing trend towards wireless as the dominant medium, a technology was needed which could push past the long-standing 1Gb/s limit. Multigigabit is this technology, capable of delivering up to 10Gb/s to the most demanding IT equipment.

Reuse existing cabling

10Gb/s speeds, and even faster, have been available over copper cabling for some time. However these options are limited, either by the need for short cable runs, or the very latest twisted pair cable types (CAT6a or higher). For many organizations, the cost of ripping out and upgrading cable outweighs the benefits, so CAT5e and CAT6 remain the prevailing copper technologies installed today. Multigigabit technology bridges a gap between the 1 and 10Gb/s standards, adding options for 2.5 and 5Gb/s over existing cabling.

Standards based

Multigigabit technology is the collaborative work of the NBase-T Alliance, a consortium of over 45 industry leaders formed in 2014. These efforts have combined into an emerging IEEE standard, 802.3bz which will formally introduce 2.5GBASE-T and 5GBASE-T in 2016.