ISO/IEC 11801

International standard ISO/IEC 11801 specifies general-purpose telecommunication cabling systems (structured cabling) that are suitable for a wide range of applications (analog and ISDN telephony, various data communication standards, building control systems, factory automation). It covers both balanced copper cabling and optical fibre cabling. The standard was designed for use within commercial premises that may consist of either a single building or of multiple buildings on a campus. It was optimized for premises that span up to 3 km, up to 1 km² office space, with between 50 and 50,000 persons, but can also be applied for installations outside this range. A corresponding standard for small-office/home-office (SOHO) environments is ISO/IEC 15018, which also covers 1.2 GHz links for cable and satellite TV applications.

Link and channel classes

The standard defines several classes of twisted-pair copper interconnects, which differ in the maximum frequency for which a certain channel performance is required:

• Class A: up to 100 kHz using elements category 1
• Class B: up to 1 MHz using elements category 2
• Class C: up to 16 MHz using elements category 3
• Class D: up to 100 MHz using elements category 5e
• Class E: up to 250 MHz using elements category 6
• Class E_A: up to 500 MHz using elements category 6_A (Amendment 1 to ISO/IEC 11801, 2nd Ed.)
• Class F: up to 600 MHz using elements category 7
• Class F_A: up to 1000 MHz using elements category 7_A (Amendment 1 to ISO/IEC 11801, 2nd Ed.)

The standard link impedance is 100 Ω. (The older 1995 version of the standard also permitted 120 Ω and 150 Ω in classes A−C, but this was removed from the 2002 edition.)

References

• International standard ISO/IEC 11801: Information technology — Generic cabling for customer premises.
• European standard EN 50173: Information technology — Generic cabling systems. 1995.
• De-Mystifying Cabling Specifications From 5e to 7A

See also

• Twisted pair
• TIA/EIA-568-B