Last week, the IEEE Standards Association Review Committee recommended the approval of IEEE 802.3an by the Standards Board, which in turn approved the publication of 802.3an without opposition.

That means the specification, also known as 10GBase-T, is now standard, and we can all start running 10 Gigabit Ethernet over our twisted-pair copper wiring with wild abandon.

Well, almost. What it really means is that we should expect products built on the standard to start making their way to the market. And you're probably going to want to make sure you have the cabling in place to support it if that's the way you want to go.

I recently received an e-mail from one vendor in the business that reminds us that Category-6a and Category-7 cabling products that would support the new 10 Gigabit Ethernet are available today, while "legacy" Category-6 cabling can still be used for 10G, at least up to 55 meters.

Legacy Cat-6? My guess is that folks who see a need for 10GBase-T will likely be installing all-new copper wiring or going straight from their current Cat-5e to the latest cabling. Let me know if I'm wrong about that.

At any rate, the 802.3an task force has been working toward this goal for more than two years, and let us not forget there was a time when folks said that 10 Gigabit over copper could not be done (or at least, that it was very difficult). They are to be congratulated.

Now the torch is passed to the vendors developing products to support the standard.

Jeff Caruso is site editor at Network World.