Network cable seller recommendations needed

[Harrison]

I need to buy a 75m armoured Cat 6 Ethernet cable (solid core wires), to run from my house to our new Log Cabin (office/art studio). But looking online and reading reviews it's seeming a bit of a lottery.

Can anyone recommend a good company selling Ethernet cables?

Also I've read conflicting views on Cat6 cables being near electric cables. I've got Cat6 running alongside wiring in my house under the floors and have tested speeds and had no issues, but I've just had a 10mm armoured electric cable installed, running along a brick garden wall about 50m and then the final 20m in a trench, and it would be easiest to drop the network cable into the same trench. Manufacturers state not to put them near electric cables, but most people in the real world say they have had no issues. Logically the way the cables are constructed should cancel out interference. It will only be handling Internet speeds anyway, not full speed file transfers, so only up to 76mbps.

 

[Trapshot]

I usually get my stuff from cablemonkey.co.uk.

as I said in my previous post/advice some time back, if you are using FTP shielded cable, you can run it alongside your electrical cable without much fear of interference.

if you are using unshielded cabling, then there will be interference on the cabling within about 6-12 inches of the electrical cabling, and it will affect how the timing of the signalling of the data flowing down the cable is achieved. The mains cabling interference cannot be cancelled out by the cat cabling construction. The cat cabling “twisted pair” construction is only designed to cancel out its “own” interference generated by the small voltages generated by the network cards to send the bits onto the cable. You can only “shield” the cable to reduce/eliminate the influence of external interference to the cable.

in the real world, what this means is that some data bits will be affected, and depending on how bad the attenuation is, can cause enough bits to drop that would affect frames and packets to be affected.

however, a lot of people either don’t notice this, or get by without worry, because the upper layers of the network stack e.g. CRC and Protocols like TCP, correct some issues by checking if the packets were sent/received in their entirety, and resending them if they need to.

so what you will want to look for is instability in protocols that are not error-checked, and are “best effort”, such as voice/video feeds over UDP. These are the packets likely to be more affected by poor cabling choices.

if you are happy to take the risk, you will probably be fine with popping the cable in the same trench, but the people who are offering conflicting views are probably not understanding what is going on at the very low level and are just happy that their stuff works. When they get dropped packets, network issues and so on, they likely are assuming it’s related to other things, such as client/server, or WiFi issues, as they will “retry” and get a good result.

 

[Harrison]

I went with cable monkey in the end as their prices were the best and shipping was cheaper and arrived quickly. Hadn't quite considered an 80m armoured cable would weigh 18KG though!

Ended up getting a bit more than needed for the shed run so I can connect up one of the other rooms in my house by running the cable outside and back in to save having to lift or chase anything inside the house.

One question. With shielded cable am I right in thinking for the shielding to have any actual benefit it needs to be grounded? Some are stating grounding at both ends of the cable, which sounds a bit strange. And would it need grounding to its own earth spike or could it be bonded to the existing earth spike that's being used by the log cabin's consumer unit? I'm guessing it's own to pervert any danger of the network cable going live in the event of an elective fault.

Going to finally run the cable to the cable tomorrow as I've just finished painting the whole thing inside and out and just finishing the floor insulation and laminate flooring today. So should be good to sit down there watching the Monaco Grand Prix this weekend.

 

[Trapshot]

Yes, ground it for best results, it can be grounded to any point, it doesn’t need to be dedicated to that cable.

 

[Harrison]

Update. Finally had the time to install the ethernet cable today. Took most of the day, drilling holes though the house and a garden wall, then feeding the cable through and along everywhere.

Fitted a wall mounted ethernet socket in the cabin/studio, then thought I'd better test the connection, so terminated the other end with a standard RJ45 and ran the tester. Good job I did because there was a fault on wire/line 1. Turned out in the end to just be a poor connection in the keystone in a cabin socket. I still need to cable cleat the cable along the garden wall and bury it fully in the final run, but otherwise all up and running.

I upgraded to BT Total Wifi when I got a free offer to upgrade to the new halo router. I hadn't used the wufi extender disc as the wifi is strong throughout the house. But an interesting feature that's not openly mentioned is the ability to connect an ethernet cable and it will find the main BT Smart Hub 2 and set itself up. It then broadcasts a repeat of your existing wifi including id and password, so you can seemlessly move between the 2 and devices don't know any difference. Worked perfectly. Set itself up without any assistance.

And now the wifi is extended there's an Amazon echo in there and a Sky Q mini box, which set itself up no problem over ethernet. So all sorted now with all the mod cons.

Need to setup a Netatmo weather station in there tomorrow.

 

[Harrison]

Everything has been setup and running perfectly in the studio for some time now. I'm currently redoing my house network, relocating most of the cabling and switches from the hallway to the otherside of the wall in the garage.

Quick question. If a shielded ethernet cable, terminated with a metal shielded RJ45 connector is plugged into a switch, will the switch automatically ground the shielded cable? Or will it depend on which switch you are using? I know a patch panel in a server rack will as that's grounded to the rack ground, but I can't find much about switches and grounding shielded cables.