The LAN market’s decline was slightly more than the data center market’s, BSRIA explained, after several years of limited growth or none at all. “The cabling industry and particularly the LAN segment, which is dominated by copper products, continue to see commoditization of cabling with increasing sales of low-cost brands sold as distributors’ private labels, and solutions supplied by low-cost suppliers,” the organization said.
“Sales of Category 6A continue to increase, and account for 18 percent of the cabling solutions sold by volume in 2015,” according to BSRIA. “However, the uptake varies significantly depending on where in the world the cabling is installed. The uptake is relatively low in the Americas and Asia-Pacific, while Europe and the Middle East have a much higher usage of Category 6A solutions.
“Category 5e is still very much sold in Asia-Pacific and America, with close to a third of all cables shipped in those regions, while sales only account for 15 percent in Europe and 7 percent in the Middle East and South Africa.”
The many facets of the data center cabling market are like a mosaic. Fiber-optic products represent more than two thirds of all cabling installed in data centers, according to BSRIA, and the uptake of fiber continues to increase—driven particularly by large and cloud data centers. “Most of the hyperscale data centers are 90 to 100 percent fiber, and both medium and large data centers are seeing an increase in use of fiber,” BSRIA said. “Copper cabling continues to be installed in computer rooms and small data centers, and are more common in colocation data centers compared to enterprise data centers, as colocation data centers in general are more cost-focused.
“Sales of preterminated fiber units—cassettes, connectors and trunk cables—have increased significantly year on year since BSRIA started collecting the sales figures in 2011. The global growth was 24 percent in 2013, 19 percent in 2014 and 1 percent in 2015.”