CAT6: Bonded pair vs non-bonded pair?

[drunkgamer]

Not sure if anyone here has experience - or at least knowledge and an opinion...

I'm thinking of using Belden Bonded twisted pair CAT6 cable for a home installation.

Their 7851A cable (bonded) is not that much more than their non-bonded cable of 4812.

Here is a PDF on both cable as part of their Belden® DataTwist®
4800 Cables: http://www.belden.com/docs/upload/NP296.pdf

Outside of cost and the marginal additional time to untwist the pairs at termination time (they provide a tool), is there any con to using bonded twisted pairs?

On the pro side, I like that the pairs will stay together regardless of my noobish installation techniques, including corners, unravelling and re-forming of the cable, etc. Also, it would seem that since for CAT6 it's important to keep the pairs twisted right up until termination punch-down, the bonded nature would help that as well.

So minus the cost + a little time, is there any reason NOT to use bonded-pair UTP cat6 cable?

THANKS in advance

 

[spidey07]

The installation hassle is really the only down side. It's quality cable. To keep the twist right up to the punch down don't unravel the end of the pair...go back an inch or two from the end of the pairs and make a little opening, then slide that over the punch down, then punch and let the cutter of the punch take off the rest. The bonded stuff does have better measurements and performance.

Showing my age here, but installers hated datatwist 350, but it was great cable and exceeded cat5e specs before it was even a spec and nothing was faster than 100 base-t. If you're going to do this and get quality cable, why not cat6a or 10 gig cable?

 

[drunkgamer]

Heya Spidey,

Thanks for the info.

I can see why installers hate it (or could) because hey...who wants any job to take longer than it should (i.e. extra time to terminate bonded-pair)? But since this is for my house and for my own needs, I can take a little longer

As for why not cat6a, well mostly because no real need. I mean sure, from a future-proofing it would be wise I guess, but even now streaming a fully ripped blu-ray movie on a gigabit network has no issues, and who really does that anyway? (ok I do ) Although I imagine in the future, services like Netflix, etc. will allow you to download full length blu-ray movies and then play them back since most ISP speeds right now won't work with streaming that.

I'm not getting the bonded-pair because I'm expecting to push the performance limits (although it never hurts, especially since they guarantee 600mhz metrics) but mostly because it's much more robust for the installation process.

Basically it will help eliminate _potential_ headaches for a noob like me despite performing a ton of due-dilligence upfront.

BTW, thanks for the tip on termination for keeping cat6 twisted right up until termination.

 

[bobdole369]

LOL @ spidey. datatwist 350. I laid probably 700 boxes of that stuff in a 1700 workstation call center. Did probably a thousand of the cube-side terminations myself.

OP you'll probably be able to run 10gb over cat6 in your house. It'll work on 5e for a couple dozen feet.

 

[spidey07]

LOL @ spidey. datatwist 350. I laid probably 700 boxes of that stuff in a 1700 workstation call center. Did probably a thousand of the cube-side terminations myself.

OP you'll probably be able to run 10gb over cat6 in your house. It'll work on 5e for a couple dozen feet.

And your fingers were raw every single day, weren't they?

 

[cmetz]

spidey07, DT350TOOL FTW (once you figured out how to use it right).

Then CAT6 came out and all that pain turned out to not be necessary to get the quality we wanted anymore, it just was at the time.

Has anyone here really done much with 10GBaseT? I get this sense that even on an extremely well installed Cat6a plant, it generally isn't worth the trouble, especially when you compare the cost delta to just get OM4 fiber pulled for the same drop.

 

[drunkgamer]

Thanks for info. Sadly, I'm having trouble finding the Belden cable and don't want to pay more than I need to or to wait 4-6 weeks to get it.

I'm considering going with Berk-Tek although I've never heard of them - though that means little as I'm a noob.

Also, while there is nothing I can do now, I was always told to avoid kinking RG6 and CAT6 (makes sense). So since the RG6 was never run from the street to the house (old house), I just finished doing that this weekend. Conduit under the grass, driveway, into the garage, ceiling, etc.

RIGHT at the last part, I was relaxed at finally being done and was "pushing" the cable through some liquid flex and not paying attention, there was enough pressure that as I was pushing, the cable suddenly kinked in half. Of course my stomach sank.

I straightended it out immediately but I imagine whatever happened...is done.

What could the effects be on my incoming cable internet signal? Is it speed that could be affected or error rate?

Just wanted to know what I should check for? I know my only option is to re-run the entire length of the incoming cable but that would make me cry.

P.S. Here is something I found from this very site from 2003:

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).