Tag: patch cable

Shocked! Most Cat5e/Cat6 Ethernet Cables Fail to Meet the Rated Specification

Recently, a number of reports indicate that most open-market patch cords, such as Cat5e/Cat6 Ethernet cables, do not meet the standard specifications. In fact, the result comes as no surprise. There are two versions of the specifications, TIA and ISO (ISO is more stricter than TIA), but neither of these standards involves enforcement organization or licensing. Vendors get away with inferior Ethernet cable because the average consumer is the least able to buy the equipment worth $10,000 to check the purchase against specifications.

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Why Cat5e/Cat6 Ethernet Cable Do Not Meet the Standard？

The cat5e patch cable we used is designed to meet performance specifications up to 100 MHz (as specified in TIA-568-C.2), enabling it to handle common 100Base-T and 1000Base-T wired networks. The cable cat6 has higher performance confirmed to 250 MHz; enabling it to handle 10GbE wired networks. However, many vendors do not take specification compliance seriously because the transmission rate of the standard Ethernet cable and inferior Ethernet cable cannot be judged easily by non-professionals, but only by cable test devices. So some vendors manufacture Ethernet cables to very lax quality standards, which leads the good and the bad patch cords are intermingled on the market.

What Are the Consequences of Cat5e/Cat6 Not Meeting the Standard?

Assuming that your network switches are all set up correctly, the bad links will slow down by themselves, but the rest of the network will run at full speed. Otherwise, the switches will turn down the speed of every link due to one bad link, and the whole node slows down. This will affect your network transmission rate and data transmission. What’s worse, inferior Ethernet cables sooner or later will cause poor network performance and could even damage active equipment. Installing counterfeit cables is a risk that eventually will have an expensive cost of maintenance.

How to Avoid Buying Inferior Cat5e/Cat6 Ethernet Cables?

So if you want to avoid buying counterfeit cables, you have to make sure the following four points.

alt Cat5e/Cat6 Ethernet Cable

Use Ethernet Cable Passed the Fluke Test

The Fluke test is considered as the most authoritative criteria for telling the quality of an Ethernet cable. This test includes patch cord testing and channel testing for Ethernet patch cables, and permanent link testing for bulk network cables. For Ethernet patch cables, the channel standard is not the applicable specification and is much easier to pass. Therefore cables passing the patch cord testing have higher performance.

Use Ethernet Cable With Oxygen-Free Copper Wire

The conductor material of copper-clad-steel or copper-clad-aluminum is a classic method manufacturer use in order to save money, which is easy to cause high attenuation and poorly signal. It is the purity of copper that determines the Ethernet cable quality. The purer the copper wire is, the less signal loss you will suffer. The purity of copper in descending order is oxygen-free copper > pure copper > bare copper > copper clad aluminum > copper-clad-steel. So you’d better choose oxygen-free copper wires. To learn more about choosing the best network cable wire, please read Network Cable Wire: Oxygen-Free Copper VS Pure Copper VS Copper Clad Aluminum VS Aluminum

Use Ethernet Cable With Fire-Proof Cable Jacket

There are two types of Ethernet cable jacket, non-flame retardant, and flame retardant jacket. Maybe not every application requires a cable to have a flame retardant jacket, but when needed, it is critical for cables to have a flame retardant jacket for safety concern. Normally Ethernet cables with PVC CM and CMP jacket are commonly used in patch cabling environment. However, some manufacturers replace CM and CMP flammability rating with inferior non-fireproof jacket material. That’s one point you would not want to miss.

Use Ethernet Cable Made By Reliable Manufacturers

Last but not least, instead of buying the cable test devices, you need to select reliable sellers that can provide the Fluke test reports and product details of above. Buying cables from a reliable manufacturer is directly related to your cable performance.

Conclusion

Choosing reliable manufacture is half the success of choosing a qualified Ethernet cable. Every Ethernet patch cables FS sells comes with its individual Fluke test report, showing that it meets the rated specification. If it doesn’t, FS won’t sell it. We manufacture the patch cable with top-quality oxygen-free copper and environment-friendly CM flame retardant jacket, and we certification-test every cable to ensure the performance. You’re welcomed to visit www.fs.com to find what you need.

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Choose the Right Patch Cable for Your Transceiver Module

To a large extent, a fluent data transmission relies on the seamless transition between patch cables and fiber optic transceivers. As high bandwidth gradually dominates the market, patch cables and transceivers become much more essential to data transmission, especially for data transmission between the switches and equipment. But when you try to find the right patch cable for your transceiver, you may feel dazzling about the great variety of products. Don’t worry, this article will help you find the quickest way to choose the suitable product. But first, let’s have a look at the basic knowledge about patch cables and transceiver modules.

Overview of Patch Cables and Transceiver Modules

A patch cable or patch cord is an electrical or optical cable used to connect one electronic or optical device to another for signal routing. It is composed of an electrical or optic cable terminated with connectors on the ends. Optical patch cables are now widely used in data centers for data transmission. They have different fiber connectors including LC, SC, ST, FC, MTRJ, E2000, MU, MPO/MTP, etc. As for fiber types, there are also single-mode patch cables and multimode patch cables. Single-mode patch cables can further be classified into OS1 and OS2. While the multimode can be further divided into OM1, OM2, OM3 and OM4.

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Transceiver is a self-contained component that can both transmit and receive. It is often inserted in devices such as switches, routers or network interface cards which provide one or more transceiver module slot. Many transceivers types, such as SFP, X2, XENPAK, XFP, SFP+, QSFP+, CFP, etc. are used for various applications. The transceiver accepts digital signals from the Ethernet device and converts them to optical signals for transmission over the fiber.

Several Aspects to Consider
Transmission Media

Two kinds of transmission media can be found in the network. They are optic fiber cable and copper cable. Therefore, transceivers also have two types based on transmission media — copper based transceivers and fiber optic based transceivers. Copper based transceivers like 100BASE-T SFP, 1000BASE-T SFP are the commonly used types. They have a RJ45 interface to connect with the copper cables. Generally, cat 5, cat 6 and cat 7 cables attached with RJ45 connectors are typically linked to the copper based transceivers.

Compared with copper based transceivers, fiber optic transceivers support higher data rates for over 100 Gbps. The supported fiber patch cables are more complicated for selection. Usually single-mode and multimode fiber patch cables are used. But according to different transmission rates and transmission distance, further choices should be made.

Transmission Rate and Distance

It is known that data rate decreases as the transmission distance increases in fiber optic cables. Multimode fiber optic cables are often used for short distances due to the high cost of single-mode optical cables. But single-mode patch cables have better performance for different data rates in both long and short distances. Thus, if your transceiver supports high data rate over long distance, single-mode should be a better choice, and vice versa.

Transceiver Interface

Interfaces are also important to the selection of patch cables that match with transceivers. Optical transceivers usually use one port for transmitting and one port for receiving. Cables with duplex SC or LC connectors are typically employed to connect with this type of fiber optic transceivers. However, for BiDi transceivers only one port is used for both transmitting and receiving. Thus, simplex patch cables are used with BiDi transceivers.

Other high data rate transceivers like 40G/100GBASE QSFP+ often use MTP/MPO interfaces. They should be connected to the network with multi-fiber patch cords attached with MTP/MPO connectors. If these ports are used for 40 G to 10 G or 100 G to 10 G connections, fanout patch cables should be used.

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Conclusion

Knowing the transmission media, transmission data rate and distance, transceiver interfaces can give you a general direction of which type of patch cables should be chosen. Only matched patch cables and transceiver modules can provide better performance.