In the commercial marine and Megayacht world CAT 5 runs everywhere on
these boats connecting PLC's to enterntainment systems, to
communication systems right into PC based NAV. Most of this is based
on industrial standards rather then marine standards. It works well
with off the shelf componets that are equally priced to NMEA pieces. I
would like to see a NMEA gateway to another protocol (other then PC)
to allow us to use NMEA 200 data on some of the other equipment
already on these large yachts.