In a departure from both 10BASE-T and 100BASE-TX, 1000BASE-T uses all four cable pairs for simultaneous transmission in both directions through the use of echo cancellation and a 5-level pulse amplitude modulation (PAM-5) technique. The symbol rate is identical to that of 100BASE-TX (125 Mbaud) and the noise immunity of the 5-level signaling is also identical to that of the 3-level signaling in 100BASE-TX, since 1000BASE-T uses 4-dimensional Trellis Coded Modulation (TCM) to achieve a 6 dB coding gain across the 4 pairs.
The data is transmitted over four copper pairs, eight bits at a time. First, eight bits of data are expanded into four 3-bit symbols through a non-trivial scrambling procedure based on a linear feedback shift register; this is similar to what is done in 100BASE-T2, but uses different parameters. The 3-bit symbols are then mapped to voltage levels which vary continuously during transmission. One example mapping is as follows:
Symbol Line signal level 000 0 001 +1 010 +2 011 -1 100 0 101 +1 110 -2 111 -1