The thing is, if you sell a client on fiber, it's
future proof for MANY generations. Hell, the entire
City of Chicago's phone network works on two fibers
into the main switch (so I'm told). Cat5, 5e,
6, 6e and 7 will all eventually be overloaded...
but there has been no talk about EVER overloading
a fiber, if only because it's so much different
in it's transmission technique.
Being an ex-Data/Telecomms guy I'd be willing to bet BIG dollars that the entire city of Chicago is not run on only two fibers. Even if it was run on two fibers, how may wave lengths? Alot !
More than likely they have at least 2 fiber sonet rings for the city of chicago. That usually involves multiple single mode fibers between individual sonet ring nodes.
IMHO, if you're concerned about gigabit datarate throughput, fiber is the only proper cabling solution. Twisted pair (copper) is not a good technical solution for gigabit datarate applications, as it is easly corrupted by external distrubers (electrical noise). Speaking from experience, it's not that easy to manage the electrical noise environment in a common household. I've personally seen a halogen floor lamp corrupted the ADSL signals, on a nearby Cat5 cable. There's a lot of poorly design houshold appliances out there.
Cat5e is good for a 350Mb datarate. Even, if there were some applications that did move this sort of amount of data it would be bursty in nature (typical IP data behaviour) and do you really need a Vette to go to the grocery store? No, but it would be fun.
Also, most real world IBM mainframe installations are just starting to use gigabit interfaces. Outside of core data network routers, switches and the like, the only place I can think of requiring gigabit data transfer rate is in a graphics workstation environment.
Just my 2 cents
