 Have you ever wondered about how the cables come to be tested, how the standards are formed? I mean we've seen the TR42 standard, we've seen the standards for ISO, but what about how that procedure was of writing those standards and how 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 I was like, well, yeah, of course, I'd love to do an interview. Let's talk about some details. What about CAT7? Let's talk about the story behind that. Why is there a CAT7 in one standard but not in the other? What does the little numbers mean on the cable? How do these companies that make the cable 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 PoE works, the way the higher wattage PoE 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 I said, it's a long interview filled with technical details, so it's fun because we get to geek 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 a long time on these committees actually creating and assisting in the creation of the standards that we all use. So I'm going to get started here with the interview now. All right, so I am here with Dan Verera. He is the global product manager of cable testing and ideal networks. Has over 20 years in the cable testing business, helps with the TIA 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 about because you reached out to me after I did my video about those cool little patch cables. Well, they're really novel and from a basic standpoint, I plug them in. I loaded them up with PoE 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 testing and I left a link to like an IEEE testing and TIA standards. But you know, you do the real side of the testing. So talk about that. Well, thanks for having me. Yeah, 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 you mentioned, I participate on the TIA, 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 in ISO, which are the broader standards for the kind of the rest of the world. And, you know, we try to keep things in sync. We call things different. So for example, what you would call or what we call CAT 6 and TIA binocular is class E and ISO and CAT 6A is class EA and so on. 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 and there will be arguments on comments as either CAT 7 exists or doesn't exist. Well, it doesn't exist in TIA, but it does exist in ISO. So it's just a real thing that OK, that it is real. That has been a debate that I've not completely understood. That's an interesting one. So CAT 7 is not a TIA standard, but it is an ISO standard. Correct. Yes. OK. So we 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 and your jacks. So those have a performance requirement, the cable being like just the raw piece of wire and those are the standards that the manufacturers would be. So if you're manufacturing jacks or 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 and when we talk about the performance of the components, both TIA and ISO use the term category. So we have category five, five, six, six, seven, etc. Now, and TIA, we skipped seven. But in ISO, when they talk about the finished system, so let's let's use Kat 6A as an example. So in the TIA standards, a Kat 6 system that you Tom might install would have Kat 6A cable, Kat 6A connectors. And when you put that all together, you would test it to make sure it has a Kat 6A performance for the whole link. And ISO, if you were doing that, you'd get Kat 6A jacks and Kat 6A cable. But when you installed it and tested it, you would use a class EA performance standard, which is the cabling standard. So it's the same thing. It's just called different stuff. So they have Kat 7 and Kat 7A components in ISO. And when they test that, it's called a class F or class A cabling system. So 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, you know, that's that's one funny confusion. So as these standards are written and you're doing you grab a piece of copper, it has, you know, a certain gauge to it and things like that. And you're certifying they can handle a data rate as set in the ISO or TIA standards. How much over like we know that we can get gigabit fine out of, you know, Kat 5B, how much over is the testing that you do over the spec? Like obviously, we know it links to gigabit. That's a standard. But, you know, my own testing right now, I'm plugged in via 10 gig over a Kat 5 because I haven't replaced with a Kat 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 you'll see it labeled in frequencies where there's a lot of manufacturer marketing misinformation. So I'll use Kat 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 Kat 6 versus Kat 6A versus five, sorry, 5E versus Kat 6. Some people argue, do you need 5E or do you need Kat 6? And I actually have the answer to that question. I will I'm interested in that answer. But so the generally speaking, and so Kat 6 would be 250 megahertz. So when you buy Kat 6 cable or or jacks, the the minimum performance requirement by standard is 250 megahertz. So if you were to test it with one of our certifiers, it would sweep at the 250 megahertz. The operating the actual operating frequency is 200 megahertz. So it's over sweat by 25 percent. So the rule of thumb kind of sense really Kat 5E has been to over sweep from a testing standpoint by about 25 percent. OK, so Kat 5E cable, we test to 100 megahertz, although the actual frequency that the signaling is at is 80 megahertz. So 25 percent of that would be 100 megahertz if you over sweat that. So OK, that about right. 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 get it to 110 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 this happens all the time. So, you know, we make one of our products are sort of the certifiers that an installer would use to make sure the cabling meets whatever category you can stop. And, you know, we do a whole bunch of tests, 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 OK, 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, some measurement by a few tenths of a DB and all of a sudden, you can't get data through it. Well, 25 percent, that that's actually nice, because that's a good buffer. It's not like just 10 percent 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, like 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 the 300 meter limit for single runs because of very unique circumstances. And it was kind of a curiosity, like, we'll 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. Yeah, as long as you're using, you know, there's certain measurements that will will start to fail. So an interesting thing is kind of the maybe the root answer to your question is. The length is really arbitrary. So the 100 meters comes from 25 years ago when, you know, with 10 megabit, like there was really that's about as far as they could get it to work. And we've built so the the general name for these standards are structured cabling standards. Yeah. 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 used to be these things back in the day called breakout boxes. And so it was a little lunchbox that had like a DB 25 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 sheet. So OK, jump pin two on this side to pin seven over there. Did it, did it, did it, you know, my first tech job was fixing old Acer Alto point of sale systems. And we had breakout boxes for the muxer and the waste terminals that we're using to connect them. So yeah, exactly. So when the structure cabling systems standard was started, it was to try to get away from that. Yeah, I'm happy. It's, you know, surviving those early days of tech. I started in the in the earlier 90s, surviving those early days of tech with twin acts networks and putting little own resistors on there. Very it's become so much easier. You know, kids these days, they don't know how easy they have it. Yeah, you just plug stuff together and it works. It just works. It's like, oh, man, the 100 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 TIA again is in TIA. It's like one of our cable certifiers. There's there's two numbers to remember for length. There's 90 meters and 100 meters and 90 meters the link. So that's from the patch panel to the wall outlet. 90 meters is the limit there. OK. And then when you include patch cords, it can go up to 100 meters. So those are the differences. So we just generally say 100 meters to, you know, per se. 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 110, 120, 130 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 pass, 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 100 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 customer is requiring that I test these lengths and I needed to go longer than the 100 meter. Otherwise, I'd have to put in fiber and how can I test it and make it pass? And, you know, I said, well, use an ISO limit, you know, the same category, same performance metrics. And it will just, you know, give you a number for length, but it won't fail if it's over the 100 meters. Well, when it comes to the manufacturers, when they start making this, you know, the different cable vendors actually making them, putting the copper in the jackets. How do they, do they submit for testing? Do they just have their own internal labs to follow guidelines set forth by standards? When we're another really good question. So when we're creating the standards of the the latest one we did was category eight a couple of years ago. So there is a cat eight. And I know I've seen some arguing on the, you know, internet about whether that's real or not. And that's it's 40 gig. Now, the big difference is cat eight's limited to 30 meters instead of 100. And we can talk about why 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 eight standard, the question is how, you know, what type of cabling do you need to make it work? So how this whole, how this stuff starts is IEEE, which, you know, they have the ethernet. So like the 100 meg, one gig, 10 gig, whatever those. That's the signaling specifications, the electrical specification. So IEEE will say, OK, we're going to do a 40 gig chip set, ethernet chip. And they'll send that spec to TIA and ISO. And they say, you know, make us a cable that will support this electrical chip set. 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 TIA, 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 of cabling and do measurements and everybody brings and shares their measurement data with each other. You know, and starts looking at, OK, 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 it 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 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 we write the document, we write the specs of the performance that's based on all that R and 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 6a cable, how do you know it's going to work? So you can do your own in-house testing, but you'll see on cables that'll 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 that will have a 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 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 and this particular model of connector, part number of cable, meets those performance requirements. So make sure the cable has ETL and it's going to be stamped. I think I've noticed that it's stamped on the cable. Stamped on the jacket, yeah. So you'll see on the jacket, ETL and it'll have an ID number and you can go to ETL's website and plug that ID number in and see who the manufacturer is. And a lot of times if you're buying sort of like generic branded cable, there'll be like one OEM and that will be the manufacturer that 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 brand ABC. That's interesting, because something I've told people to steer clear of and I've never done any thorough testing with it, but everything about it from electrical standpoint sounds wrong. Is that copper clad aluminum crap? You hit the nail on the head, especially in regards going back to the PoE video on the patch cords. CCA 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 cable, the wires in your cable are aluminum and they put a little coating or a cladding of copper over the top of it. Now I've seen it where it's marked CCA. People may not know what that means and 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 a reason why it's okay and then there's a reason 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, there's a phenomenon called the skin effect. So you can look at Wikipedia on that. So if you imagine you have a piece of wire and the higher the frequency, the signal will travel on the outside skin 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, the centrifugal force may 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 outside's copper, you have a low resistance or low impedance path for the signal and it should work, which for the most part, data transmission is okay on CCI wire, but you talk about PoE, right? And so- That's where your problems come in. PoE is huge, like it's funny. For how many years have we been saying fiber is gonna kill copper, right? Fiber can't carry power though. Yeah, but one thing you can't do with fiber yet is transmit power. So all of these sensors and devices and cameras, wireless access points, we wanna power all those with PoE and so that really is kind of one of the things that keeps copper moving over the 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're putting through goes through the middle of that conductor and your loss is at least 20% higher in terms of power loss. Wow. So you have two things going against you then is with copper-clad aluminum, you have high power loss for PoE. And then also the trend to further reduce costs by making the conductors smaller. So those small patch cords going back to sort of what brought this whole thing on, when we were developing the latest draft of the standard, we knew people love these little patch cords because they're just so small and handy and they don't cram up all your wire management. And there is a significant amount of power loss in those. So there's an addendum in our 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 for mono price are 32 gauge, which I found interesting because I didn't find anything in either standard for 32 gauge. Yeah, the standard only recognizes down to 28. So if it's anything smaller than 28, which a larger number, that's outside the scope of the standard. Not saying it would work, but loss would be even worse on a cable like that. What would be interesting is to see if the cable's marked with on the 32 gauge, 568.2-3, so that's the newest standard 568.2-3. If you see that on a like 30 or 32 gauge cable, then that's not technically correct because the standard doesn't recognize that. And they don't. I went all, even on the page mono price, the only ones I know that manufactured at 32 gauge, I mentioned them by name, they do not have any search listed on that one only because the 28 gauge one was also for mono price and that one does have a reference, but the other ones do not. Well, that's good. Marketing is kind of omitted. They're being honest and they're advertising to people who are aware of that, right? Right. You know, a lot of people would have no clue as to when you're in that mess. Yeah, people shop by price and hey, that looks convenient and not always. Yeah. And so, yeah, they will work and, you know, for shorter distances, you know, as far as the power goes. So I use them 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 crazy. And I've got just so much stuff that those little patchboards 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 as far as POE testing goes, you know, there's a, you know, in full disclosure, I saw that video and I sent you one of our, a new tester. Yeah. And we just got the new tester by the way. So we're excited to start testing new stuff with that. So if you use that, you will see the voltage drop and I can explain how it works to you later, but you'll see different voltage drops depending on the length and the size of the wire and different amount, you know, less power able to come through small cables like that. So there is, in reality, there is a practical limitation on how much power you can get through those. Yeah. And that's, well, that's one of the 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 level electronics player. And so, you know, I studied a lot of that and not professionally, but, you know, to make sure I understood that the engineers that worked 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 when we, you know, of course we're dealing with all the 30,000 to 90,000 volts on the old TV repair we were doing, but the same concept supply. So right away when I see them, like 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 PoE devices. But once you look at some of these higher end, like a PTZ camera, for example, that's got a much different wattage profile than a wifi access point. Exactly. And, you know, with the new 802.3BT standard, you can get 90 watts or more from some of these devices. So that little tester will actually try to draw. So you, how it works is you hook it up, you can hook it up directly to an access point or a switch, sorry, an injector or a switch. Yeah. And it'll pull power, it'll 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 wanna know how much power is there, you can plug it in and 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 supplying enough power for what you need to do. And that's where things, you know, from if you're just sort of playing around experimenting, that's where things get interesting, is where you put, you know, 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 that 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 in, you'll see 30 watts or if you go to 120 meters of cable, you'll see 30 watts because the power supply in 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 100 meters, where if you go to like a cheap POE 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, doesn't have enough headroom built in. So that is a big thing with POE and we're hearing from customers is, you know, troubleshooting devices and trying to figure out if it's the device, the cable, the injector, you know, where the problem is. And I've done a little bit of that troubleshooting, you know, breaking out the electronics had again, you know, we did used to troubleshooting even on things like if you're with really high end audio equipment or McIntosh, that was one of our niches was repairing a lot of the equipment and you would see the different specs. Like sure, they all claim a similar standard, but you start putting the meters on things and loads on them. You're like, okay, I 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 the switch became defective, but it was causing any of the longer lengths of cable was causing problems. So I was just putting just a standard, you know, multimeter on the voltage is wrong. Well, yeah. And so you'll totally get this, but when people, you know, we talk about POE and voltage, you know, it's generally around 48 volts. And so I'll just hold up an example. So this is a, actually one of the sort of prototypes. So this is the little tester I'm talking about and this is not a picture or anything. But we had a version of this that just does cable testing, TDR and it would detect POE. So if you plugged it into POE, it would just say, okay, there's POE, what pins it is, you know, how many bits, 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 kind of thing. But I'll tell someone the difference is if, you know, you have a car battery and you go out and you put your voltmeter on it with light, everything's lights off and all that. And you might get 12 volts, 13 volts, whatever. And now hold that voltmeter on there while 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 tick, tick, tick, tick, you know, dropping down to just a few volts, we're on a healthy battery. It will drop a couple of volts, but, you know, be able to put enough power out. 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 POE 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 of volts, that's normal. If you see it drop 10 volts, that's not normal. And that's telling you, okay, there's a lot of loss in your cabling. Yeah. And that's gonna cause all these device problems because when you, once you start undervolting a device, you immediately end up with a device with random behaviors. So- Exactly, exactly. And it could be the installation. I've been, I've done troubleshooting at hospitals with access points. And it's for, for installers and integrators, these types of devices are great because a real world example, we had an access point that was, it would randomly reboot and stuff 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 we went to the IT department and the guy we were talking to swore up and down to, no, it's not the switches. All the switches are programmed fine. Nobody's, and I was like, look, man, I just tested it. We're only getting whatever number we're getting. And so he kind of fine, it logged into the switch and went, and I told him what port number we were at. He's like, oh, that port was set to a low power mode. So 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. Troubleshooting those problems. So when you add some randomness of power problems, that just gets crazier. Let's go back to something you said, cat 5e versus cat 6. Oh, okay. And get that answer. One gig, one gig bit. So that, so do you, this is the source of constant argument. I say, do you need cat 5e or cat 6 for one gig? The answer is you can use either. Okay, so when one gig was first being developed. So, you know, you're talking in the mid 90s or whatever. There's, and if you, you know, use your Googler and you look up 1000 base T and 1000 base TX, TX or T, you'll see two different things. And I can't remember which one was which, but there was two philosophies of how to deploy one gig. So one philosophy was, you know, and again, this is the mid 90s. So everybody had just upgraded including the company I was at to 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 chipset, the fire, the chipset was designed to use all four pairs. So before that with 10 100 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 like, it's a one, each pair is a one way street. So with 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 in 100 megahertz but basically use a 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 and get one gig out of it. The other option was to go the route of using less expensive network cards and use cat 6 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 100 megahertz. So basically, you'd say, well, we can have, even though 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 chip. So back in the 90s DSP stuff was very expensive. So you could kind of brute force it by just saying, hey, let's put in better quality cable, cat 6 cable, so that's where the cat 6 spec came from that'll run to 200 megahertz. The signal was 200 megahertz and the cat 6 spec for the cable length is 250 because we overswept it. So to make sure it works a little beyond that 200 megahertz. 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 bi-directionally and all this expensive digital signal processing or you could go a cheaper route and buy a 200 megahertz card, which, you know, in new cabling. So if you were building a new building, that might make sense, okay? Put in cat 6, all of your switches and nicks will be cheaper, but if you're upgrading and retrofitting, it was a lot, an easier pill to swallow to pay more for that equipment but not tear out all your cable. So those were the two systems and basically the laws of economics took over as more people said, you know, you had more people wanting to retrofit and upgrade to gig and they were buying the more expensive network cards. And of course, as more and more people bought them, the supplies the rest came down, it goes down, yep. And all of a sudden it became affordable. So the, and I can't remember, I think 1000 base T is the cat 6 version and 1000 base TX is the 5E. I might have that reverse someone 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 four pair full duplex signaling on cat 5E cable. So cat 6 cable as a 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 a good definitive answer. You might be able to work with the headroom and people to this day still, you know, want to put in cat 6. So if you're going to make a jump, the jump should be considering 5E and then jumping to 6A. Right. Because 6A will get you 10 gig. Yeah, and 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 cost 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 going to do it now, the price is coming down on cat 6A even a little bit. So just go there because that way your future proved to 10 gig. And just right on my head, as you mentioned, PTZ cameras. So everything I'm talking about was sort of the perspective of data transmission, but when you bring PoE into it, now you have another factor to consider. So the reason cat 6 is more expensive, there's a couple of reasons, but one is the conductors are generally a little larger. So instead of 24 gauge, it might be 23 gauge, 22 and a half. So that slightly larger conductor will let you transmit more DC power further. So you have higher power devices. Yep, so that would be a good reason. You know, if you don't need the data rate, but you want to put 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. Yeah, yeah. No, and it still makes sense. It's still very valid what you said. And it is the thing that's been debated. And in the overall picture too, the other takeaway might be skip the whole cat 7 thing. So it's cat 6A and at some point in the far, far distant future, we're going to see cat 8. We have, yeah, and we have cat 8. 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 8 is two gigahertz, so 2,000 megahertz. And so that's very high frequency compared. So for everyone listening, you know, cat 5e is a hundred megahertz, cat 6, 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 actually proportional. So if it's like more or less double the frequency, the signal loss is going to be twice as high. And that's the main reason it is only good to 30 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 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 TIA 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 length of cabling is going to meet the needs of 80% of data center owners. Because it was never assumed that you were gonna see cat 8 going to the desktop because first of all, we knew it couldn't go a hundred meters. So how much did it, how long did it need to be a viable solution for data center operators? And it turned out that 30 meters meets 80% of the needs of data center users. So- Yeah, because the other options in a data center is running like active SFP cables or copper SFP to get that, to get the data around the data center at any high speed. So this probably makes it a little bit easier so you can actually, you know, cut, terminate. And it's- You have more flexibility as far as, you know, doing that versus direct attach channel would be being where it's one piece of cable with everything built into it. So, but yeah, so, you know, cat 8, it's not taken off, you know, primarily because of data centers you're not seeing people put it in building. Now it will, you can run it a hundred meters, it won't give you 40 gig. And then, and actually in the ISO standards, there's a cable-ing spec we're working on for 25 gig and trying to get 25 gig out to a hundred meters. So it's a little more than 10 gig, not quite 40, somewhere in 25. And then there's, have you heard of N-Base T? No, I have not. So N-Base T, there's a couple of dueling technologies, but that, it's also called multi-gig. And Cisco started working on that and that's now been standardized. So that is 2.5 and five gig. And so, so now what 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 cable-ing couldn't support 10 gig, the switch would fall back to one gig. Right. So what an N-Base T or multi-gig switch will do is depending on, and this is meant for, if you have cat 5e or cat six cable. So if it doesn't support 10 gig, the switch will try to fall back to five gig. And the spec says cat six will, by design cat six should support five gig and a good quality cat 5e will support five gig. And if it doesn't work there, it'll fall back to 2.5 gig. So it's another upgrade passive. You have existing cable-ing and you wanna get more advanced with through, you can put in one of these switches. And I didn't realize that was the name of the standard, but I'm familiar with it because I have 10 gig ASUS card in mind and I know it says it supports the 2.5 and five as well. Yeah. So it's a fallback thing. So if you've got cable-ing that's somewhere performance wise between six and six A or 5e and six A, you'll get speeds of either one, two and a half, five or 10 gig. Okay. That's kind of cool. I mean, so that does, we look at things like that, it does give you a reason to put in the best cable you can afford because who's to say 10 years from now, some new thing doesn't come along and get even higher data rate over some cable-ing you put in a while. Yeah. And it's interesting. And it's really only our edge case clients that we're installing 10 gig cards in, some of our design clients and even the reason I'm the only works nation of my office with it because of video editing. I don't know the videos are stored on a NAS array back there. So all my editing is done and it's obviously easier over 10 gig connection. So it's like it's connected. Exactly. Yeah. And then so the new standards of speaking of 10 gig, the new TIA standard that I mentioned the 568.2 D recommends cat six A for all your drops, the sport 10 gig. But for wireless access points, it recommends two cat six A 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 two access points that are high data rate. And then you have the AX. So now you're getting access points that can support 10, 20 gig bandwidth. So, people out there who are trying to future proof and putting in cabling for access points because we know there's so much stuff is moving over to Wi-Fi and I'm still old school. If I can plug a cable into it, it makes me happier because I know it's gonna work. But, everything that's moving to Wi-Fi, you've got to provide that backhaul bandwidth from that access point back to your switch. And so as a minimum today, if you're in any sort of corporate education, large venues, environments, you probably want to do at least two six A drops for your access points. I was looking down, I have one of those, we work a lot with Unifine, they send us one of their stadium ones, which that's what it has is that dual connectors for that because it supports the support that's 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 jacksonics, I'm like, well, how do you get all that backhauled? Hey, cool. I can connect to 1.7 gig or 1.7 gig of bandwidth, but I need to backhaul that off there. Yeah, that's interesting. So I don't know if it has a 10 gig fine or not. I would assume so. Yeah, it's got a 10 gig and a one gig on it, which I think is kind of weird. I wish you had two 10s. Okay. So you can get 12 or 11 gig. Yeah. But yeah, or I guess or two. So if you had an old, you know, a one gig switch, but yeah, so 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 hit on something else you mentioned in the small patch quarter. And I think you were reading about heat. You mentioned when you were 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 patchwork? So now the, so generally speaking, the heat conversation is for high power POE. 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, some amount of energy in that cabling that, you know, is dissipating this heat. And you've got big bundles of cables together. So what happens? So the, so again, this goes back to the companies that make the cable and stuff. So they did tons of experiments bundling cables together, putting thermocouples in them, putting power through and measuring a heat rise based on how much power and how many cables in a bundle. And so in that standard week, there's a model in there. So you can plug in, in this mathematical model, any number of cables with that certain, you specify the wire gauge and the diameter and da, da, da, da. 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 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 can happen is if you have big bundles of cable and you're running a lot of high power POE devices in those, the cables in the middle of that bundle will start to get hotter and hotter. It's not, they're not going to burst into flames or anything. No. But the temperature could actually get high enough. Now keep in mind, you might be thinking about, oh, well, I'm in an air conditioned room right now. And it's like, okay, no big deal. But imagine you're down in like Phoenix in the middle of summer in an unair conditioned cable tray where the temperature up there is 130 degrees and now you start adding temperature rise on top of that. Well, most of them are above a drop ceiling and combined with that and conduit. So there's simply, there's no active cooling going on. It's just the ambient of the heat bleeding through, which of course means it holds a lot of it in. It does, yeah. And there's different models for in conduit and not. But the worry is that, you know, you could have a cable and let's say from a testing standpoint. So let's say you installed a bunch of this cable and you certify it and it all passes cat 6A. 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 if the balance of the resistance, the DC resistance of the cable is off, that creates more waste of heat energy. But 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 of a sudden you're actually having data issues customers are cleaning 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 heat is one of those three factors and signal loss, it's length of the wire, frequency and then temperature. I guess eight or two. Yeah, that's really interesting because it's one of those when we built the building and we tested it worked and then something changed in the 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, that's really interesting. Model, instead of making people do all the calculations, the general, is it 40s? Oh, I should remember the number, it's been so long, but in that there's a chart in there that says, generally do not exceed cable bundles more than X number of cables because under worst case scenarios, you'll be okay. But if you start bundling cables and higher count bundles then you could actually start to have this issue. And playing head, you're like, well, I'm not doing PoE now but when we design a cabling system, so this is interesting. People always say, why are 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 generally how long either a building is there or the tenant comes in and tears it out. Before it gets some type of remodel retrofit that we can't place the wiring in. Generally, we're shooting for a 20 year lifespan. So, if you're installing the latest stuff and we know that most people out there aren't putting in all high spec Cat 6A or Cat 8 cabling or whatever. But that's where the standards go. And then everything trickles back down. So you'll start to see what was when Cat 6A cable first came out. I mean, you were talking like $800 for a thousand foot school. It was insanely expensive. And it just comes down to mass installs that's driving the price down. And we just did, we did a job. I think it was 400 drops of Cat 6A. So pretty good size. And it's nice because the customer was forward thinking of the going, this is what we want top to bottom. They had us, because it's a 100,000 square foot building and they're like, we want all these drops and all these locations here. So if we ever want to do something more than the basics, it's there. Because once they put everything in the building you can't get around it anymore. And that is extremely expensive and inconvenient. So 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 6A, you shouldn't be able to get 20 years. Well, watch out for that seat, that copper cloud aluminum. Oh yeah, watch out for that. I'm telling you, we have no shortage of customers who are having strange issues with PoE. 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 cloud 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 too 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 I'm just like, they're doing something different. And then I noticed that they had CCA, because they showed me the bid sheet and I'm like, oh, so that's a different type of cable. I said, well, they wanted me to match with the cable. And I'm like, I could probably match price if I use that cable, but I'm not going to because I actually want to guarantee my work. Well, and it will, like it'll probably pass data but PoE later on. And then you get into all kinds of weird stuff with, you know, going back to like electrical wiring and housing. It used to be they would mix copper and aluminum wiring together, but you get corrosion, electrolysis. Well, yeah, I was going to 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, that's another 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. And you know, when you, when you punch that connector down the ID or that cable down, you're 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, you know, yeah, exactly. You put it exactly right. Who's to say that it's going to work today, but a few years from now, all of a sudden things just start, you know, you start getting weird random errors as connections start to go bad and stuff. Yeah, so just avoid all of that. Well, this was very in depth and informative. This was a fascinating discussion. I'm really glad you reached out. Thank you for taking the time. This is, I think a lot of people are going to find this interesting because there's so much more that 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 in like, what? 13 years ago, the cat A is when you start, or cat A? I think we started in 2004 and it was published at the end of 08. So it took 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. 2004 to 2018. Yeah, 2018. But 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. People get frustrated, but it's got to work. It's got to work. There's a lot that has to go into it. So because we don't want things corroding and rusting and failing. So, well, thank you very much for that. We will be testing out that meter. I'm like I said, I know it came in just before we started this interview. So I know my staff is, they were oohing and eyeing and playing with it. They probably have it plugged in right now. All right, well, go find some bad patch cords. We're going to go test those patch cords and see what kind of load, see if there's any problem with them. And you gave me a whole multitude of other ideas like what would happen, because I'm willing to destroy a couple of things. If I bought a bundle of cable heated it up, at what point does the change overheat? Yeah, we can, I'll be happy to talk to you about that. Well, we'll do the experiment first and then you can tell me what I did wrong, but we're going to 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 for having me. Thanks for watching. If you liked this video, give it a thumbs up. 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