Belden Mediatwist Bulk Cat6

[Aganack1]

is Anyone Familiar with this cable. If so how well does it work for home network....??

 

[ScottMac]

MediaTwist is **OUTSTANDING** cable (even though it looks like Romex (power cable)).

The biggest pains is the bonded pair (one of the things that makes it some of the best you can buy). You have to separate the individual wires of each pair to terminate it, but there's a special tool available to make it pretty easy.

It makes it good cable, because the wires of the pair cannot move relative to each other (extremely consistant sweep performance).

What adds to the overall excellent engineering is that the four pairs are then put into a channel within the sheath, so regardless of the bends, kinks, twists that tend to occur .... the pair-to-pair spacing stays the same (again, excellent, consistant sweeps).

In the Lab, we knotted 90 meters of MediaTwist into a large ball (knots, then knot the knotted section, knot it back on itself, run over it with a car, knot it some more, run over it some more (etc, continue until you have a breadbox-sized ball of knots).

Then it ran an industry-certified/recognized bench sweep test (~US$100,000.00 HP test equipment). The cabling passed at JUST BARELY under CAT6 level performance.

Next we connected it (the "football") up between two Fore Systems ATM switches (Copper 155 Mbps): No errors. Then we connected up the unused pairs (3,4&5,6) to an RF balun and pumped cable TV at high levels ... the TV images were perfect, and the ATM switch links showed no errors.

To make a really long story short, we totally abused this cable, and it passed CAT5 every time (acutally just barely missing CAT6 / Level 7 ... by the smallest margin).

This is some of the best cable you can buy, no sh*t. It IS a pain to terminate, but you get used to it and then it's no big deal ... if you're doing the termination, make sure you get the "Belden tool" for splitting the pair and stripping the sheath (same tool you'd use for DataTwist 350).

Pardon my gushing, but this really was impressive stuff.

(I don't work for Belden, none of my friends or family work for Belden, I have no reason to lie or exaggerate about it)


FWIW

Scott

 

[cmetz]

ScottMac, I used to be a hard core fan of DataTwist 350. Installers would always complain loudly about the stuff because of the bonded pairs, and I admit that it's a pain, but it's great cable and so I told 'em to suck it up 'cause I wanted the best 😉 When I've terminated lots of the stuff, the pads of my fingers and my nails haven't been right for days (the DT350TOOL is okay, but often it cuts into one of the wires' jackets instead of zipping the middle - I usually just stick my fingernail down between the pairs and zip them apart).

For my new house, though, I went with Berk-Tek LANMark 2000, which at the time was considered the best over-cat-6 -- Belden didn't have a competitive offerrng. It does NOT have bonded pairs, and it's MUCH easier to install, and it's better cable than the DT350. My office uses Berk-Tek's LANMark 350, direct competitor to the DT350, and it's great stuff (I've run gigabit way way beyond distance+segments spec over it). Since then, I haven't tried the Belden cat6 cable to compare.

So if you ever get a chance, give the Berk-Tek stuff a try. It's just as good in terms of signal and easier to install. And it's all pretty similar cost. I'd be interested in a good head-to-head on the test equipment -- I don't have good analog signal test equipment at work, only Ethernet/IP layer 😉

Aganack1, look into the Berk-Tek. Both are overkill for most home networks. But if you're a hard core networking person, you want the best home network you can have, just because 😉 (do I need 1000BaseT at home? No. Do I have it? Of course!) If you want to save money, Belkin and a couple of other private label brands have generic cat6 available that will be good choices and cheaper.

Reasonably good Cat5e is fine for 100Mb/s, and you can probably use it for 1000BaseT fine too. Cat6 gets you a significant headroom in terms of cable/signal quality, so you'll be in better shape for 1000BaseT, and have some room to grow beyond. In both cases, I must stress that installation quality (especially termination quality) is likely to make a bigger difference than the difference between cables. The best cable in the world installed poorly is still not going to give excellent signal quality.

 

[ScottMac]

Amen. I'll take cheap (but up-to-minimum-spec) cable installed properly over a Cadallac cable done by a schlock anytime.

The Lab tested virtually all of the "Brand Name" cables and booked the resluts (actually, still does, I just don't work there anymore).

They also perform ongoing testing to make sure the cable delivered for stock meets spec. If it doesn't, the whole batch goes back (and probably gets delivered to a competitor).

FWIW

Scott