Aquantia Corp., pioneer and market leader in high-speed Ethernet connectivity solutions for data centers, mobile, and enterprise infrastructure, today extends market leadership with the industry’s first 8-port (octal) PHY device ideally suited for enterprises and Small and Medium-sized Businesses (SMBs) seeking the optimal balance of performance, footprint and cost for their Ethernet switch systems. Aquantia’s AQrate 2.5GBASE-T Octal PHY features industry leading architecture to achieve the smallest (23mm x 23mm) footprint, allowing customers to deploy the next generation of high-density Ethernet switches in the enterprise and SMB environments.
Aquantia’s 2.5GBASE-T Octal PHY, AQR809, is compliant to the recently approved IEEE 802.3bz standard and the NBASE-T specification for optimal compatibility. In addition, the device also features 100M and Gigabit Ethernet speeds options for backward compatibility with existing networking equipment.
This unique PHY is designed to upgrade network speeds by as much as 2.5x compared to the previous generation of GbE equipment using the vast existing installed base of Cat 5e and Cat 6 copper cables, while providing backward compatibility with existing equipment in Enterprise and SMB networks.
“Aquantia’s 2.5GBASE-T Octal PHY is the first in the industry to pack 8 ports in a single device doubling the port count relative to currently shipping Quad PHYs,” said Kamal Dalmia Sr. VP Sales & Marketing at Aquantia. “Networking equipment vendors can now make these higher data-rates ubiquitous in today’s high-performance networks.”
The digital workplace is placing crushing capacity demands on enterprise and SMB networks. The latest generation of WiFi Access Points (APs) integrates the IEEE 802.11ac standard, driving a total throughput of multi-Gigabit/s of wireless data required to be transported on the wired infrastructure between the APs and the wiring closet Ethernet switches. Today though, more than 90% of the installed base of cables in the enterprise and SMB environments is composed of legacy twisted pair copper cables, such as Cat5e and Cat6, that were designed only for 1 Gigabit Ethernet. Replacing the cables already installed in the walls and the ceilings is highly disruptive and expensive.
Foreseeing the upcoming bottleneck on the wired infrastructure, Aquantia developed AQrate, a technology capable of delivering throughput of up to 5Gbit/s over 100m of Cat5e/Cat6 cables. Together with major industry players, Aquantia co-founded the NBASE-T Alliance to further develop and promote the technology within the enterprise and SMB environments. In September 2016, the multi-Gig technology that Aquantia pioneered was formally approved as the IEEE 802.3bz standard. Aquantia’s AQrate product line is the only PHY technology in mass production today that enables Enterprise Networking to scale to Multi-Gigabit/s throughput on existing Cat5e and Cat6 cabling infrastructure.
The Aquantia AQR809 2.5GBASE-T PHY is sampling now. Production release is scheduled for Q1-2017.
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