The BEFORE and AFTER on shielded cat6 is NIGHT AND DAY for me

I used to think shielded cable was a waste of money. That was before I ran 200 feet next to a fluorescent light fixture in a commercial building downtown. After I swapped to shielded cat6 and actually grounded both ends properly, my packet loss went from 15% to zero. The interference from those old ballasts was destroying my signal the whole time and I could not see it. Has anyone else had a big moment like this where you realized the standard unshielded stuff just is not enough?

2 comments

2 Comments

owens.willow15d ago

Did you have to fight with the electricians about grounding?

oliver_fisher15d ago

Hold up on that grounding both ends thing. For shielded cat6 you actually want to ground only one end, usually at the patch panel side. Grounding both ends creates a ground loop which can cause more noise and interference than just leaving it ungrounded in the first place. I learned this the hard way when I fried a switch port on a job a few years back. The electricians were actually right about that one part, but they were still wrong about everything else. Did you test it with just one end grounded to see if your packet loss got even better?