Interview: Dan Barrera With Ideal Networks About TIA 42 Cabling Standards & Testing Processes

have you ever wondered about how the cables come to be tested how the standards are formed I mean we've seen the TR 42 standard we've seen the standards for ISO but what about how that procedure was of writing those standards and how would they were put together and tested and validated well it's done by committee and one of the people who's on that committee Dan from ideal networks granted an interview he actually reached out to me after I did my cabling video and I was excited and you know I was like well yeah of course I'd love to do an interview let's talk about some details what what about cat seven let's talk about the story behind that why is there a cat seven and one standard but not in the other what does little numbers mean on the cable how do these companies that make the cable of get certified to verify that their cable matches the proper spec you know so I know I'm buying the right things more technical than in-depth answers of why I should stay away from things like oh I don't know copper clad aluminum and he covers that in depth including the way the p OE works the way the higher wattage p OE coming out works and the problems that may be encountered by using thinner cables on that and testing procedures that are done and how they validate all this so like this is a long interview filled with technical details so it's fun because we get to keek out about cabling and all the little detail testing and he's an excellent excellent teacher of all this he's been a long time in the business and long time on these committees actually creating and assisting in the creation of the standards that we all use so I'm gonna get started here with the interview now all right so I am here with Dan Barrera is the global product manager at cable testing and I deal networks has over 20 years in the cable testing business helps with the EIA standards and the ISO standards so you have a lot of experience you actually go to the events and help write the cabling standards and this whole conversation came apart because it came about because she reached out to me after I did my video about those cool little patch cables while they're really novel and from a basic standpoint I plug them in I loaded them up with P OE and they do seem to work you have a lot more technical insight into why they work how they were tested and because I had alluded to some of the test I left a link to like a knight Ripley testing and taa standards but you know you do the real side of the testing so you just talk about that what they thanks for having me yes so when I was watching that video I just had an aha moment because here's you know someone who likes these small gauge patch cords and when we were doing the last round of standards development so as he mentioned I participate on the TI 8 which is a telecommunications industry association so we that standards that are primarily used in the Americas you know Canada US Latin America some some countries in Asia England uses them and then also an ISO which are the broader standards for the kind of the rest of the world and you know we we try to keep things in sync we call things different so for example what you would call or what we call cat6 and TIAA vernacular is class II and ISO and cat6a is class EI and so on and and then there's so there's a lot of things that are similar and there's a lot of things that are different you know every every once in a while I hear people talking about cat 7 cable there will be arguments on comments as either cat 7 exists or doesn't exist well it doesn't exist in TA so it's just a real thing that ok that in fact it is real that has been a debate that I'm not completely understood that's an interesting one so cat 7 is not a TA standard but it is an ISO standard correct yes okay so we and the other confusing thing is when we we we talked about standards there's three sets of performance standards that both organizations develop so we have components which would be your connectors so your plugs in your jacks so those have a performance requirement the cable being like just the raw piece of wire and those are those standards at the manufacturers with you so if you're manufacturing jacks are manufacturing wire you would make sure your products comply with those and then third one is the cabling standard and that's the performance when you marry that stuff together and terminate it in the field so in when we talk about the performance of the both TI a and i still use the term category so we have category 5 5 e 6 6 a 7 etc now and TI a we skipped 7 but I so when they talk about that the finished system so let's let's use cat 6a as an example so in the TI a standards a cat 6 system that you saw might install would have cat 6a cable cat 6a connectors and when you put that all together you would test it to make sure it has a cat 6a performance for the whole link and I so if you were doing that you'd get cat 6a Jack's and cat 6a cable but when you installed it and tested it you would use a class e a performance standard which is the cabling standard so it's the same thing it's just called different stuff so they have cat 7 and cat 7a components in ISO and when they test that it's called a class 4 class F a cabling system so they they do exist it just doesn't usually see our you know stuff it's normally not used in the US there's some exceptions but that's that's so as these standards are written and you're doing you grab a piece of copper it has you know certain gauge to it and things like that and you're certifying they can handle a data rate as set in the ISO or ti a standards how much over like we know that we can get gigabit fine out of you know cat 5e how much over is the testing that you do over the spec like obvious we know what links a gigabit that's a standard but you know my own testing right now I'm plugged in via 10 gig over a cat 5 because I haven't replaced where the cat 6 but it works it's a really short run yeah that's a really good question so generally speaking when you're looking at categories of stuff you'll see it labeled in frequencies right this where there's a lot of manufacturer marketing this information so cat 6 as an example and if we have time we could talk about there's there's a really interesting history about one gig and cat 6 vs cat 6a vs. 5 sorry 5e vs. cat 6 some people argue do you need 5e or the unique at 6 and I actually have the answer to that question I will I'm interested in so the generally speaking in so cat 6 would be 250 megahertz so when you buy cat 6 cable or jacks the minimum performance requirement bystander's 250 megahertz so if you were to test it with one of our certified it would sweep at the 250 megahertz the operating the actual operating frequency is 200 megahertz so it's over swept by 25% so the rule of thumb kind of sends really cat 5e that's been to over sweep from a testing standpoint by about 25% okay so cat 5e cable we test to 100 megahertz although the actual frequency that the signaling is that is 80 megahertz so 25% of that would be 100 megahertz if you over swept that so okay so that's kind of the general rule of thumb so what you're asking about though is you know if something's rated for one gig at 100 meters which is sort of the limit you can yes can you get it to a hundred ten meters 120 meters how much further and the the answer is that the the standards are definitely very conservative so that if you install something and even if it were to and this happens all the time so you know we make one of our products are certified certified installer would use to make sure the cabling meets whatever category you can stall and you know we do a whole bunch of test electrical tests on that to see if it passes those specs that are in the standards if that test fails it doesn't necessarily mean that the cable won't pass data and in most cases if it failed by a little bit it will probably work okay because there's a lot of built-in margin to those standards so we don't want something where it's just on the edge yeah by a few tenths of a DB and all of a sudden you can't get well 25% that that's actually nice cuz that's a good buffer it's not like just 10% or something like that and we have a number and I like when we have some finite answers versus well you know a bunch of arguments and forums so people who have never done what you're doing and actually spent the time engineering this you know the sideline engineers but the it's kind of interesting too because I have definitely run over to the 300 meter limit for single runs because of very unique circumstances and it was kind of a curiosity like well try it if it works if not we'll stick something else on it and we've gotten pretty far over with having no challenges with it so thank you for that buffer you're using there's certain measurements that will start to fail so an interesting thing is kind of maybe the route answer to your question is the length is really arbitrary so the hundred meters comes from 25 years ago when you know with 10 megabit like there was really that's about as far as if they could get it to work and we've built so the general name for these standards are structured cabling standards yep and the idea there is to have some structure in universal installation rules and guidance so that you know if you go back to the 70s and 80s everything was proprietary so yeah you know IBM would have a certain cabling for their systems and digital equipment somebody else's and nothing you know nothing was compatible and there there used to be these things back and that they called breakout boxes and so it was a little lunch box it had like a db25 connector on each side and then little jumper wires so if you were interfacing one brand of computer system to another you could hook them together and then you would have a cheat sheets it's okay jump in - on this side - pin seven over there did you know my first tech job was fixing old ACL toe point and we had breakout boxes for the muck sir and the waste terminals that we were using to connect them so yeah when the structure cabling systems were started was to try to get away from that yeah I'm happy it's you know surviving those early days of text I started in in the earlier 90s surviving those really is a tech with twinax networks and putting little ohm resistors on there very it's become so much easier you know kids these they don't know how easy they have it yeah you just plug stuff together and it just works it's like oh man the hundred meter channel limit is is really pretty arbitrary and frankly most systems will go over that and so this is where you get into an interesting difference between iso and TI a again is in TI a it's like one of our cable certifiers there's there's two numbers to remember for length of there's 90 meters and hundred meters and 90 meter is the link so that's from the patch panel to the wall l outlet 90 meters is the limit there okay then when you include patch boards that can go up to 100 meters so those are the differences so we just generally say a hundred meters to you know percent but in so if with for example one of our testers and you test a cable that's longer than that it will by standard it has to fail that test and ISO the length is purely informative so it could be a hundred ten hundred twenty hundred 30 meters and it will tell you how long it is but it does not pass or fail the what matters is do the actual measurement parameters like the signal loss and crosstalk if those all paths who cares how long the cable is right it'll work and so that's really kind of a more pragmatic way versus saying it's got to be a hundred meters no longer so you know so I've had integrators and installers call us before and they're like I need to you know my customers requiring that I test these links and I needed to go longer than 100 meters otherwise I'd have to put in fiber and then Anna how can I test it and make a pass and you know I said well use an ISO limit you know the same category same performance metrics and it'll just you know give you a number for length when it comes to the manufacturers when they start making us you know the different cable vendors actually make them put in the copper in the jackets how do they do they submit for testing that they just have their own internal labs to follow guidelines set forth by standards so when we're creating the standards so the the latest one we we did was category a couple years ago so there is a cat eight and I know arguing on the you know internet about whether that's real or not and that's it's 40-gig that was the big difference is CAD eights limited to 30 meters instead of under meters and we can talk about why and it has to do with the high frequencies and insertion loss and things like that but so let's say when we were developing the cat 8 standard the question is how you know what type of cabling do you need to make it work so how this holes how this stuff starts is I Triple E which you know they have the Ethernet so like the under mag one gig 10 gig whatever those that's the signalling specifications the electrical specification so I Triple E will say okay we're gonna do a 40 gig chipset Ethernet chip and they'll send that spec 2t i-a and iso and they say you know make us a cable that will support this electrical chipset and then so you know we get off and running and start doing development work and and then a lot of the different cable manufacturers so in t IA we have meetings every three months and in iso every six months so they'll do a bunch of measurements in the lab they'll make prototypes cabling and do measurements and everybody brings and shares their measurement data with each other and you know and starts looking at okay based on the signal levels you know this is the type of wire we need to use for example with cat eight it was a big can we do what unshielded or does it need to be shielded that was a big thing what gauge of wire does it need to be how long can it go so ultimately the the spec is derived from practical measurements performed by the manufacturers of the cable and connectivity and stuff so then that gets fed into the documents when you write the document we write the specs of the performance that's based on all that R&D work now I think the question you're asking is if you're then a cable manufacturer and you want to make a cat's it's a cable how do you know it's gonna work so you can do your own in-house testing but you'll see on cables that will have ETL mark on it and ETL is a third-party testing lab so most of us are familiar with UL like you buy an appliance UL mark so ETL is a lab and they do they're basically like UL so you would submit as a manufacturer ETL would come in and they would go in and test samples of your products and if it passes whatever category you're trying to get you get a certificate that says this brand in this particular model of connector part number of cable you know meets those performance requirements so make sure the cable has ETL its and it's gonna be stamped I think I've noticed that is stamped on the cable on the job yeah so you'll see on the jacket ETL and it'll have an ID number and you can you can go to each Elle's website and plug that ID number in and see you know if who the manufacturer is it and a lot of times when if you're buying sort of like generic branded cable they'll be like one om and that will be the manufacturer that you know designed and makes the cable but you might buy that cable under different brands but that ETL number will be the same because the underlying design of the cable has been tested and they're just selling it and marking it as that sistering is something I've tried I've told people to steer clear of and I remember doing thorough testing with it but everything about it from electrical standpoint sounds wrong is that copper clad aluminum crap you you hit the nail on the head especially in regards going back to the ple video on the patch cords see see a copper clad aluminum cable so for people who aren't aware of it it is ultimately it's a way to reduce cost so copper is expensive more so than aluminum so copper clad aluminum is where the conductors of the of the cable the wires in your cable are aluminum and they look good a little coating or a cladding of copper over the top of it now I've seen it where its marked CCA people may not know what that means and any you know especially if you're buying online or whatever it's a lot cheaper than other cable and you're good to steer away from it and I'll tell you why there's there's a reason why it's okay and then there's a reasons why it's bad so not to get too deep in the mud but generally speaking the higher the frequency of signal you're putting on a piece of wire the there's there's a phenomenon called the skin effect so you can look at Wikipedia on that so if you imagine you had a piece of wire and the higher the frequency the signal will travel on the outside in of that conductor so if it's like DC current it travels through the middle of the conductor but as you go higher and higher frequency all the signal is pushed to the outside edge you can sort of imagine it like if you're spinning something that's a typical yeah something spin and the faster you spin it the faster it goes so in theory we're talking about high frequency data signals they're all gonna travel on the outside skin of that cable so if the inside is aluminum and the outsides copper you have a low resistance or low impedance path for a signal and it should work which for the most part data transmission is okay on CCI wire but you talk about ptoey right and so as your problems come in yo E is huge like it it's it's funny you know we've for how many years have we been saying fiber is gonna kill copper fabricant kyra power though yeah one thing you can't do with fiber yet its transmitted power so all of these sensors and devices and camp you know cameras wireless access points we want to power all those with P OE and so that that really is kind of one of the things that keeps copper moving over fiber but going back to what my example of the wire and the skin effect what I said was DC power goes through the middle of the conductor so if you have an aluminum conductor with copper on the outside the high-frequency data may get through without much loss but the power the DC power you put in through goes through the middle of that conductor and your loss is at least twenty percent higher in terms of power loss Wow so so you have two things going against you then is with copper clad aluminum you have high power loss for pew II and then also the trend to further reduce cost by making the conductors smaller so those small patch cords going back to sort of what brought this whole thing on yeah when we were developing the latest draft of the standard we knew people you know people love these little patch cords because they're just so small and handy and you know you they don't cram up all your wire management and there is a significant amount of power loss in those there's an addendum in our and our stamp last standard on using 28 gauge power 28 gauge cords and I think some of the ones you had were like 30 or 32 gauge the newest ones from monoprice are 32 gauge which I found interesting because I didn't find anything in either standard for a 32 gauge yeah the standard only recognizes down to 28 so if it's anything smaller than 28 which larger number that's outside the scope of the standard not saying it would work but right loss would be even worse on a cable like that well it would be interesting is to see if if the cables marked with on the 32 gauge 568 dot 2 - 3 so that's the newest standard 568 dot 2 - 3 if you see that on a like 30 or 32 gauge cable then that's not technically correct because the standard doesn't recognize and they don't I win although even under the page monoprice the only ones I know that manufacture the 32 gauge I mentioned by name they do not have any search listed on that one only because it the other the 28 gauge one was also from honor price and that one does have reference but the other ones do not aid market is there being honest in there yeah advertising to people who are aware of that right right you know a lot of people would have no clue as to where that man now people shop by price and hey that looks convenient and not always and so that yeah they will work and you know for shorter distances you know as far as the power goes so I use it myself I have tons of around here because I won't pan this camera around but my office is just full of test equipment cabling it's it's crazy and I've got so much stuff that those little patch cords are so easy when I'm connecting testers to all different types of you know test fixtures and things that I'm working with I love them too but but as far as pH testing goes there's an you know in full disclosure I saw that video and I sent you one of our new testable yeah and we're just got the new tester anyway so we're excited to start testing yeah so if you use that you will see the voltage drop in and I can explain how it works to you later but you'll you'll see different voltage drops to paint on the length and the size the wire and different amount you know less less power able to come through small cables like that so there is in reality there is a practical limitation how much power you can get three of those yeah and that's well that's one things I thought about right away so a little bit of my background besides working in tech for a while I had a TV repair store we did a lot of board love electronics player and so you know I study a lot of that and not professionally but you know to make sure I understood the engineers that work for me did and you know I just understand that as the copper gets smaller there is so many losses that's why there were certain minimums we you know of course we're dealing with thirty thousand ninety thousand volts on the old TV repair we were doing but the same concepts apply so right away when I seen them like the the laws of physics are like hey I can only get so much electricity through certain gauges of copper this seems you know probably good for lower-end POA devices but once you look at some of these higher and like a PTZ camera for example that's got a much different wattage profile than a Wi-Fi access point exactly and you know with the new you know 2.3 bt standard you can get 90 watts or more from some of these devices so that that little tester will actually try to draw so you would how it works is you hook it up you can hook it up directly to it an access point or switch sorry an injector or a switch yeah and it'll pull power it will tell you you know what class and how many watts you're getting or you could be at the end of the cable so if you put in that 120 meter run and you want to know how much power is there you can plug it in it'll say okay you're getting 23 watts or however many watts available and you can look at the specs of the device that you're gonna put there and make sure that that is supply enough power for what you need to do and and that's where things you know from if you're just sort of playing around experimenting that's where things get interesting that's where you put you measure the power right at the switch and then you put on some cable and measure the power at the end of the cable you will see some drop and it depends on the quality of the switch you're using some of them are very well regulated where I'll just use 30 watts as an example where it's expect to deliver 30 watts but it should be 30 watts at the end of 100 meters of cable so you so some good switches or injectors you will see 30 with a tester like that if you plug it directly and you'll see 30 watts or if you go the 120 meters of cable you'll see 30 watts because that the power supply and there has a bunch of margin going back to having extra margin built in that it's been designed to deliver at least that much power over a hundred meters where if you go to like a cheap p OE injector you might see 30 watts when you plug it directly in but you put on 100 meters of cable and you might see 15 or 20 watts or something like that because it's not it doesn't have enough Headroom built in so that yeah thing with POA and we're hearing from customers is you know troubleshooting devices and trying to figure out it that's the device the cable the injector you know where the problem is and I've done a little bit that troubleshooting you know breaking out the electronics head again you know we did you see troubleshooting even on things like if he was really high-end audio equipment or Macintosh that was of our niches as repairing a lot of the equipment and you'd see the different specs like sure they all claimed a similar standard but you start putting the meters on things and loads on them you're like okay can see there's difference and we've had trouble where we've had cabling problems with we do a lot of camera systems and it turned out that the it wasn't the right wattage coming out of an old switch I don't know if this which became defective but it was causing any of the longer lengths of cable was causing problems I was just putting just a standard you know multimeter and quoting the voltage is wrong well yeah so you'll totally get this but when people you know we talk about P OE and voltage you know it's generally around 48 volts and so so this is a sort of prototypes so this is the little tester I'm talking about and it's not a picture anything but we had a version of this that just does cable testing TDR and it would detect P a week so if you plug it into P a we would just say okay there's p OE what pins it is you know how many points 48 volts for example but that's not while pulling a load that's an unloaded test so the new version of this which looks exactly the same it'll tell you two things it'll tell you that voltage with no load and then when it's drawing power what's the voltage and I kind of use an example and you're up north so you're probably familiar with the dead car battery in the winter yes kind of thing someone the difference is if you know you have a car battery and you go out and you put your volt meter on it with light everything's lights off and all that and you might get 12 volts 13 volts whatever okay and now hold that voltmeter on there you crank the engine over and you'll see that if that battery is not super healthy you'll see that voltage plummet and if you know you're hearing you know yeah dropping down to just a few volts we're on a healthy battery it will drop a couple volts but you know be able to put enough power out this turn the starter motor start the car and still stay in that voltage range so it's the same thing like what you're talking about with either the POA source or if you have copper clad aluminum cabling you're gonna lose a lot of power in the wire itself and so the tester will this new one will say okay here's the unloaded voltage and then here's the voltage under load and if you see it drop a couple volts that's normal if you see it dropped 10 volts that's not normal and that that's telling you okay there's a lot of loss in your cable room yeah and I mean it's gonna cause all these device problems because we once you start under folding a device you immediately end up with advice with random behaviors so exactly and it could be the installation I've been I've done troubleshooting at hospitals with access points and it's for installers and integrators these types of devices are great because a real-world example we had an access point that was reliant it would randomly reboot and stop just like you were saying and so I you know we did a power test on it and we weren't getting the power we were expecting so he went to the IT department and the guy were talking to you swore up and down to know it's not the switches all the switches of program find nobodies and I was like look man I just tested it we're only getting whatever number we're getting and so I come fine it logged into the switch I went and I told him what port number we guys like that port was set to a low power mode yeah but he you know you flipped it back to full power and everything worked fine but you know you could you could chase your tail for days trying to troubleshoot stuff like that yeah I mean it's hard enough the network engineering when it all works troubles doing those problems so when you add some randomness of power problems that just gets crazier now let's go back to something you said cat 5e vs cat 6 okay and that answer so that so do you this is the source of constant argument I see do you need cat 5e or cat 6 for one gig the answer is you can use either okay yeah one gig was first being developed so you know you're talking in the mid 90s or whatever there's and if you if you you know use your Googler and you look up 1,000 base T and 1000 base T X T X or T you'll see two different things and I can't remember which which one was which but there was two philosophies of how to deploy one gig so one philosophy was you know again this is the mid 90s so everybody had just upgraded and completing the company I was there - cat 5 cable and probably not even cat 5e at that point but everyone had all these brand new cat 5 installations and so one thought point was well we'd like to be able to get these cat 5 installations from 100 Meg to one gig without people having to tear out cable so what they did is that chip set the fire the chipset was designed to use all four pairs so so before that with with 10100 Ethernet you're using two pairs in each direction so two pairs going this way and two pairs going the other way and they don't talk to each other you know it's it's like it's one each each pair is one-way street right with the the one of the solutions was to use all four pairs in both directions still at 100 megahertz because we know that cable will perform at 100 megahertz but basically use it very sophisticated encoding something called echo cancellation which is sort of like crosstalk but you'd have very expensive network cards but you could put them on your existing cat 5 cable one and get one gig out of it the other option was to go the route of using less sense of network cards and use cat6 cable so the network cards in those cases they would have run at 200 megahertz and then required cat 6 cable because the cat 5e cable only scored hunter maker so basically you'd say well we can have even though that it sounds weird even though the frequency is higher it's a 200 megahertz signal you didn't have all the expensive DSP technology filtering and all that on the chips so back in the 90s DSP stuff was very expensive so you could kind of brute force it by just say hey let's put in better quality cable cat 6 cable so that's where the cats expecting from then I run to 200 megahertz the signals 200 megahertz and the cat 6 spec for the cabling is 250 because we over swept it so to make sure it works a little beyond that 200 Hertz so you had in the market you could do if you wanted to go to one gig you could buy network cards and switches that were more expensive but ran over your existing cat 5e at 100 megahertz using four pairs bidirectionally and all this expensive digital signal processing or you could go a cheaper route and by 200 megahertz card which you know in new cabling so if you were building a new building that might make sense ok put in cat 6 all of your switches and Nick's will be cheaper but if you're upgrading their retrofitting it was a lot an easier pill to swallow to pay more for that equipment but not tear out all your cabling so those were the two systems and basically the laws of economics took over as more people said I'm you know you have yet more people wanting to retrofit and upgrade to gig and they were buying the more expensive network cards and of course as more more people bought them the supplies that came down yep and all of a sudden it became affordable so the and I can't remember I think 1,000 base T is the cat 6 version and 1000 base TX is the 5e I might have that reversed and you can go online and see that but you'll see the different signaling rates so ultimately what happened is yeah the cost went down and that's what we know today is the 100 megahertz for pair full duplex signaling on cat 5e cable so so cat 6 cable as a as of media to transport gigabit really has no use you know it gives you more margin more Headroom but fundamentally if it's 100 meters that you want to run and you want to do gigabit 5e works just as good as cat 6 got it that is good in advance people to this day still you know want to put in cat 6 so if you're going to make it jump the jump should be considering Phi B and then jumping to 6a right the 6a will get you 10 gig yeah in the 6 is slowly it's come down in price but you know it's still not quite as cheap as that as the cat 5e so it's still a little bit of Pro savings but like I've told a lot of people and a lot of the bigger jobs we've done lately have been cat 6a if you're gonna do it now the price is coming down on cat 6a even a little bit so just go there because that way your future proof to tell me and you just Brad on my head as you mentioned PTZ cameras so yeah everything I'm talking about will sort of the perspective of data transmission but when you bring POA into it now you have another factor to consider so the reason cat 6 is more expensive there's a couple reasons but one is the conductors are generally a little larger so instead of 24 gauge it might be 23 gauge 22 and 1/2 so that slightly larger conductor will let you transmit more DC power further so he's less loss higher higher power devices yep so that would be a good reason you know if if you don't need the data rate but you want to put you know high power devices at the end so cat 6 from that application does make sense but I was speaking just purely from if you want a one gig signal yeah data transport no and it still makes sense it's still very valid what you said and it's it is that thing that's been debated and in the overall picture to the other takeaway might be skipped the whole cat seven things so it's cat 6a and at some point in the far far distant future we're gonna see cat eight we have yeah and we have cat eight and like I said the limitation is that it's 30 meters and not a hundred and that now you get into the effect of frequencies so cat eight is two gigahertz so 2,000 mega Hertz and so that's very high frequency compare so so for everyone listening you know cat 5e is a hundred megahertz cat six 250 cat 6a is 500 megahertz and cat 8 is 2,000 megahertz so a big step up four times yeah and what happens is you go up in frequency the signal loss gets worse so it's it's actually proportional so it's like more or less double the frequency the signal loss is gonna be twice as high and that's the main reason it is only good to thirty meters because at that frequency range there's just too much signal loss so you'd have to put in the conductors of the cable would be super thick to try to go you know that much further so it's just not practical so it's it's data centers and when we were developing the standard mechanic Center we started that in 2000 maybe four or five I think and what the T ia did was go out to a lot of data center owners and look at the layout the topology of data centers and try to figure out what lengths of cabling is going to meet the needs of eighty percent of data centers because it was never assumed that you were gonna seek a date going to the desktop because first of all I knew we knew it couldn't go 100 meters so how much did it how long did it need to be to to be a viable solution for data center operators and it turned out that 30 meters you know meets 80 percent of the needs of data center users so yeah the other options in a data center running like active SFP cables or copper SF to get that to get to get the data around the data center in high speed so this Fri makes a little bit easier so you can actually you know cut terminate and it's more flexibility as far as you know doing that versus direct attach direct attacks channel would be right being where it's one piece of cable with but everything built into it so but yeah so you know candidate is it's not taken off you know primarily because it's data centers you're not seeing people put in a building now it will you can run it 100 meters it won't give you 40 gig and then and actually an ISO standards this is there's a cabling spec we're working on or 25 gig and trying to get 25 gig out to to 100 meters so it's a little more than 10 gig not quite 40:25 and then there's have you heard of n base T and I have not so n base T there's a couple of dueling technologies but that it's also called multi gig and and cisco started working on that and that's now been standardized so that is 2.5 and 5 gig and so so now what they they're doing is you have a 10 gig switch so like right now if you were to buy a typical 10 gig switch if the cabling couldn't support 10 gig the switch would fall back to one gig right so what a n based here multi good switch will do is depending on and this is meant for at the half cat5e or cat6 cabling so if if it doesn't support 10 gig the switch will try to fall back to 5 gig and the spec says cat6 will you know by design cat 6 should support 5 gig and a good quality cat 5e will support 5 gig and if it doesn't work there it'll fall back to 2.5 gig so you know the upgrade path so if you have existing cabling and you want to get more bandwidth through you can put in one of these switches and I you know what I didn't realize that was the name of the standard but I'm familiar with it because I died obtained gig aces card in mine and I know it says it supports the two and a half and five as well yeah so it's a fallback thing so if you've got cabling that somewhere performance-wise between six and six a or five e and six a you you'll get speeds of either one two and a half five or ten gig okay that's kind of that's that's kind of cool I mean so that does you know we look at things like that it does give you reasoning a reason to put in the best cable you can afford because who's to say ten years from now some new thing doesn't come along and get even higher data rate over yeah and it's it's interesting and it's really only our edge case clients that were installing ten gig cards and you know some of our design clients and even the reason I'm the only workstation in my office because of video editing I don't know the videos are stored on a nasa ray back there so all my editing is done and it's i was easier over ten gig connection so it's like it's connected exactly yeah and then so they knew the new standards of speaking of ten gig the new CIA standard that I mentioned 562 D recommends cat6a for all your drops you know the support ten gig but for wireless access points it recommends to cat6a drops because then you get 20 gig of combined data rate so for the new well they're not new anymore but the AC second wave yes those points that are high data rate and then you have the ax so now you're getting access points that can support you know ten twenty gig from a bandwidth so you know so for people out there who are trying to future-proof and putting in cabling for access points because you know we know there's so much stuff is moving over to Wi-Fi and I'm still old school I can plug the cable into it it makes me happier because I know it's gonna work but you know but all this everything that's moving the Wi-Fi you've got to provide that backhaul bandwidth from that access point back to your switch and so you know as a minimum today if you're in any sort of corporate education you know large venues environments you probably want to do at least two six eight drops for your access points I was looking down I have one of those we work a lot with unifying they sent us one of their stadium ones which has that's what it has is that dual connectors for that because it supports to support this is a massive amount of clients and it's got the multi MIMO it's got a whole array of antennas but right away the first question I had was I looked at the network of Jack's onyx I'm like well how do you get all that backhaul hey cool I can connect a 1.7 gigger 1.7 Giga bandwidth but I need to backhaul that off there that's interesting so I don't know if it has a 10 gig fine it or not I would assume so yeah it's got a 10 gig and a 1 gig on it which i think is kind of a I wish I had two tens okay so you so you can get 12 or I guess or two so if you I don't know you know a one gig switch but yeah there's you know the cable the copper cabling is still you know pushing forward the distance limitation is going to be a big thing and so actually I wanted to him something else you you mention in the small patch quarter and I think you were reading about Heat yes and you're talking about those that's a good topic yeah and people go you know how does that you know what's the deal with heat in the patch words so now the so generally speaking the heat conversation is for high power p OE so again you know that's 90 watts and the question was okay you get a lot of cables in a bundle what's going to happen when you know you will lose some amount of heat in that case some oh not some amount of energy and that that you know is dissipated as heat and you've got big bundles of cables together so what happens so the so there again this goes back to the companies that make the cable and stuff so they did tons of experiment bundle cables together putting thermocouples in I'm putting power through and measuring a heat rise based on how much power and how many cables in a bundle and so on that standard we there's a model in there so you can plug in in this mathematical model any number of cables with a certain you specify the the wire gauge and the diameter and littered up and it says okay it predicts how much temperature rise is going to be there and the reason that's important is because the signal loss of your data so the we call it insertion loss I'm used to be attenuation but the the signal loss or insertion loss of your data is a function of three things the length of the wire the frequency and the temperature of the conductor so what could happen is if you have big bundles of cable and you're running a lot of hot rpoe devices and those the cables in the middle of that bundle will start to get hotter and hotter so they're not gonna person flames or anything now but the temperature could actually get high enough now keep in mind you might be thinking about oh oh I'm in an air-conditioned room but you know imagine you're down in like Phoenix and the summer in an air-conditioned cable tray where the temperature up there is you know 130 degrees and now you start adding temperature rise on top of that well a mole samar above a drop ceiling and combined with that and conduit so there's simply the aunt there's no active cooling going on it's just the ambient the heat bleeding through which of course means it holds a lot of it in yeah and there's different models for in conduit and not but the the worry is that you know you can have a cable and let's say from a testing standpoint so let's say you you installed a bunch of this game when you certify it and all passes cat6a there's also new measurements for measuring the resistance of each conductor in the pair so you have two conductors in a pair so we're measuring each conductor within the pair and then within each other because the if the balance of the resistance the DC resistance the cable is off that creates more waste of heat energy but the the problem then is that in theory you could have these bundles of cable getting warm where you tested it and it passed but now all the sudden you're actually having data issues cuz you know customers are going about slow network connections or whatever and the cable can actually the temperature can increase enough where the signal loss the data signal loss increases to the point where you start dropping packets and stuff so that's actually the concern with temperature is that the cable gets hot to a point where you actually start experiencing data losses because he is one of those three factors in signal loss its length of the wire frequency and then temperature I guess a yeah that's really interesting because it's one of those when we built the building and we tested and worked and then something changed in a building that created an ambient temperature problem and now we have a problem that we didn't see six months or a year ago and becomes the headache of troubleshooting yeah yeah it's really interesting model instead of making people do all the calculations the the general is it 40 so in that there's a chart in there that says you know generally do not exceed cable bundles more than X number of cables because under worst case invite scenarios you'll be ok but if you start bundling cables and higher count bundles then you could actually start to have this issue you know and playing head you're like well I'm not doing POV now but whose when we design a cabling system so this is interesting people always say why why are the these specs so high so cabling structure cabling systems are designed to last 20 years so not that it will support the absolute latest and greatest technology that comes out in 20 years but that's the desire so because that's a generally how long either a building is there you know yeah you ten it comes in and tears it out before it gets some type of remodel retrofit that yeah and generally we're shooting for a 20-year lifespan so you know if you're installing the latest stuff and we know that most most people out there aren't putting in you know all high spec cat6a or Cadi cabling or whatever but that's that's where the standards go and then it you know it everything trickles back down so you'll start you start to see what was one cat 6a cable first came out I mean you were talking like eight hundred dollars for a thousand foot school and it's just you know prices and it just comes down to mass installs it's driving the price down so and we just did we did a job but I think it was 400 drops of cat 6a you know so pretty good size and you know we it's nice because the customer was forward-thinking enough to going this is what we want top to bottom they had us because it's a hundred thousand square foot building and are like we want all these drops all these locations here so if we ever want to do something more than the basics it's there because once it's once they put everything in the building you can't get around it anymore extremely expensive yeah it's it's good to have all those out there and like you said it's you try to be forward-thinking so if you installed the latest cat six then you should be able to get twenty years well just watch out for that seat that copper clad aluminum oh yeah watch out for that we have no shortage of customers who are having strange issues with p OE and the fact is they're just not aware of it so you know I've seen cabling data sheets are on the box it'll say copper clad aluminum spelled out but a lot of times just in small print it'll say CCA yeah and I think people just don't know because there's so many price shoppers is the way I would do it and I brought this up when we were bidding against the company someone their price was just substantially lower than ours and just like I they're doing something different and then I noticed that they had CCA they show me the bid sheet and I'm like oh I said that's a different type of cable I said I I said well they wanted me to match with the cable and I'm like I I could probably manage price if I use like you know what I'm not going to because I actually want to guarantee my work well it will like it'll probably pass data but POA later on and then you get into all kinds of weird stuff with with you know going back to like electrical wiring housing it used to be they would mix copper and aluminum wiring together but you get corrosion electrolysis yeah I was gonna say when you get to the metallurgy side of it the chemistry of it you don't mix metals that's just a general rule of thumb when you're doing this oddly I went to school for a machine tool and welding it because it wasn't in computer classes really available but I mean there's a lot of discussion we had on the metallurgy and so it just stick that's nice thing is like in the back of my head going you know I'm not a chemist or a metallurgist but it seems like you shouldn't put these two metals together and hope that they last the next 20 years exactly yeah you know when you when you punch that connector down the ID or that cable down your piercing through that wire and now you're kind of exposing the aluminum part to air and you could start to get more oxidation and and you know exactly you put exactly right who's to say that that's it's gonna work today about a few years from now all the sudden things just start you know you start getting weird random errors as connections yeah so just avoid all of that well this was very in-depth and informative as a fascinating discussion I'm really glad you reached out thank you for taking a time this is I think a lot of people are gonna find this interesting because there's so much more than I think people even realize that go into these standards and when you talk about the length of time like you said what was it and like what 13 years ago the cat a is when you share cat eight yeah we I think we started in 2004 and it was published at the end of o8 so it's about 14 years to develop that standard yeah so there's just a long time and goes in there but there's a lot of thought there's a lot of engineering keep out 2004 to 2018 yeah 2018 but uh I don't think there's anything that would ever be fast if you put enough really smart engineers and have them work on the nuances of coming up with a standard it's going to take that long and people get frustrated but you know it's it's got to work it's got to work there's a lot that has go into it so who's we we don't want things corroding and rusting and go ahead failing well thank you very much for that we will be testing out that meter I'm like I said I I know it came in just before we started this interview so I know my staff is they were wing and eyeing and playing with it they probably have it plugged in right now go find some bad patch cords we're gonna go test those patch cords and see what kind of loads see if there's any problem with them and you give me a whole multitude of other ideas like what would happen is I'm willing to destroy a couple things if I bought a bundle cable heated it up well at what point does the change overheat yeah well do the experiment first and you can tell me what I did wrong but it will be well we're gonna have some fun with it and do some backyard science here at the office because I'm curious now all right so hey thank you very much you're welcome thanks around me all right thanks for watching if you like this video give it a thumbs up if you want to subscribe to this channel to see more content hit that subscribe button in the Bailiwick on and maybe YouTube will sense you and notice when we post if you want to hire us for a project that you've seen or discussed in this video head over to Lauren systems comm where we offer both business IT services and consulting services and are excited to help you with whatever project you want to throw at us also if you want to carry on the discussion further ahead over to forums at Lauren systems comm where we can keep the conversation going and if you want to help the channel out in other ways we offer affiliate links below which offer discounts for you and a small cut for us that does help fund this channel and once again thanks again for watching this video and see you next time

Channel: Lawrence Systems

Views: 10,803

Keywords: structured cabling, cat 6, data cabling, structured cabling system, TIA 42 Cabling Standards, tia, data center, cable, data center cabling, ethernet, network, cat6a, cat6a vs cat7, cat6a patch panel, rj45, cat5e, cat7, cat7 vs cat8, cat7 vs cat6, cat5, patch cable

Id: kNa_IdfivKs

Length: 57min 8sec (3428 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 12 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/pocketknifeMT]

TIA can eat a dick. Nothing like a standards organization nobody can get the standards from without paying $3000 for some PDFs.

How exactly is one supposed to check a builder's work, or they their subcontractor's work? Everyone pays?

[u/kingrpriddick]

Discussion was the best flair I could think of, but this is important information explained in a way to dispel common myths and reduce confusion! If you have questions or want to discuss this topic this post should be a good place to do that.