Home network cable and screens

[fourtwentyfour]

I would like to increase the number of network sockets in my home, there are adequate cable channels in the walls. Currently there is some old cat 5 which seems adequate and is easy to work with.

I notice that faster cables have screens on the copper pairs and a further one on the whole cable.

My question is, how are these screens terminated?

Are they cut short and left floating, or must one end go to ground somewhere? If floating how does the screen work as a shield? I haven't found any wall sockets or cable plugs that show a ground terminal.

Is it worth considering fibre within the home, yet, for internet and tv?

Thanks

[servodude]

Pretty sure on CAT6 there's a shield that can get grounded (on one end only hopefully)- which is the difference betwixt STP and UTP cables
but I can't remember there being a connection other than the normal RJ45 pins for this to happen

[paulnumbers]

Is it worth considering fibre within the home, yet, for internet and tv?

Thanks

I wouldn't bother. Cat6a will do 10gbit/s for 100 meters. A 4k stream from netflix is only around 25mbit/s. At the risk of being ridiculed in the future, I see no reason why you'd want more than 1gbit/s never mind 10gbit/s.

[Infrasonic]

Over short distances CAT cables can go over their specified max throughput.

It's worth having plenty of bandwidth on your trunk LAN so you can throw large uncompressed files over it efficiently if needed.
For instance there are solid state NVMe DAS/NAS' coming to market now that can easily saturate Gb, they are coming with dual 10Gb and even TB4 (40Gb) ports.

I'm just looking at a similar situation in my flat and 10Gb is the minimum I'm looking at for the trunk side of things, even if individual kit may only have Gb ports.
An HDMI 2.1 cable has a bandwidth of 48Gb for reference.

The higher the rating on the cable the more CMR RF rejection there is and the more critical the ground is. Terminating Cat 7/8 for instance needs much more attention to the 'hygiene' of the connectors.

Fibre is doable and the economics are lowering all the time but is difficult to do DIY as the termination hygiene there has to be pretty spot on unless you run ready made/terminated cables into things like keystone jacks/wall boxes et al.
You can mix fibre/CAT via specialist plugs.

There's a ton of really good YT videos by networking pro's on how to do all this and the gotchas to watch out for when planning fibre/CAT, when to get an installer in versus DIY etc.

[Urbandreamer]

I notice that faster cables have screens on the copper pairs and a further one on the whole cable.

My question is, how are these screens terminated?

This is a very unusual system for Ethernet, as the plugs and sockets don't really accommodate it.

Cat 6 usually has a whole cable screen. The plugs and sockets have metal bits, not the pins, that come into contact. Shielded connectors.
This screen is earthed at both ends, effectively creating a short circuit for magnetic eddy currents.

Magnetic fields are not the only source of noise. Noise can also be communicated by capacitance or by radio waves.
The solution for that is screens around each twisted pair connected at only one end to zero volts. However the Ethernet standard use of the RJ45 consists of differential pairs. There is no means of connecting these screens when using standard Ethernet.

[Infrasonic]

https://www.reddit.com/r/HomeNetworking ... ?rdt=36427

[fourtwentyfour]

Thank you for the interesting answers.

[jaizan]

Cat6a will do 10gbit/s for 100 meters. A 4k stream from netflix is only around 25mbit/s. At the risk of being ridiculed in the future, I see no reason why you'd want more than 1gbit/s never mind 10gbit/s.

I don't see it either, however, I remember a friend once saying having 48kb of RAM in a computer is a gimmick and you will never need more than that.
He's since started an electronics company and made 8 figures from it, so his judgement isn't always wrong.

[paulnumbers]

I don't see it either, however, I remember a friend once saying having 48kb of RAM in a computer is a gimmick and you will never need more than that.
He's since started an electronics company and made 8 figures from it, so his judgement isn't always wrong.

Maybe I'll be proven wrong. One benefit of cat6a over fiber is that you can use it for POE too.

[Infrasonic]

...One benefit of cat6a over fiber is that you can use it for POE too.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power-over-fiber

Horses for courses.

As I wrote upthread you can mix and match fibre/copper these days easily (even in a home install) so for high bandwidth trunking in generally straight runs? - fibre.

Shorter terminal runs round corners or other more hazardous environments - copper.

ISP speed is a red herring.

If you have deep enough pockets you can get 10Gb symmetric FTTP in some places, boutique fibre providers are doing 3Gb symmetric even for home supply in many places in the UK now and the LAN demands from solid state NAS' are going up exponentially.
A RAID 10 all NVME PCIe X4 SSD NAS is going to saturate anything you can give it short of enterprise grade fibre...

[paulnumbers]

Well, I'm flabbergasted to hear that there is optical power! I've never comes across that before. 70watts, really? That said, it does not seem to be a commercially available product.

>If you have deep enough pockets you can get 10Gb symmetric FTTP in some places

And you can put 10gb over cat6a quite happily.

>A RAID 10 all NVME PCIe X4 SSD NAS is going to saturate anything you can give it short of enterprise grade fibre

To do what with? In my job I work with the people who cut up feature length films, and most of them just get 1GB to their desks (some do get 10gb now, which we deliver on copper). Whilst there may be 5 home users in the UK that 10gb could help with, which they can get with copper, I really can't see anyone needing 40gb or 100gb, which is really where you start needing fibre.

By all means fibre up your house, but I don't think it makes sense as a general recommendation.

[Infrasonic]

...To do what with? ...

Try looking on You Tube at 'homelabs' or following up to date developments in networking for SOHO fibre use. Have you seen how many You Tube content creators are 4K native these days? I watch live 4K feeds all the time. LTT are 8K native now.

NAS usage is not just for storage these days, multitasking with multiple containers (docker)/VM's et al is very useful and if you have the hardware power then you can run an awful lot before bottlenecking locally - so why make your WAN/LAN the weak point?

If you have TB's of locally stored data (like 4K Blu Ray rips...) what's the quickest way of backing it up off site which should be part of any cogent plan? Could it be a fast FTTP uplink speed perchance?

My laptops are both equipped with TB4/USB4 (40Gb) ports and I now have a 4TB TB4 NVME SSD multi partioned NTFS/EXFAT/EXT4 for multiple OS and VM backups/snapshots. The sooner I can get that all moved to a networked all NVME DAS/NAS and auto- scheduled the better.

I've been keeping tabs on them since they started to hit the market and there's now some that have enough PCIe lanes in the chipset architecture to fully exploit a decent RAID setup without costing a fortune.

Occulink is another local high bandwidth link for eGPU usage. TB5 is coming as is USB4 gen 2.

I'm looking at getting a mini PC workstation/server next with 10Gb SFP+...https://www.youtube.com/results?search_ ... orum+ms-01

[jaizan]

If running network cable around your house, surely the true way to future proof it is to have ducting through which new cables can easily be routed ?
Then unforeseen changes in technology can be accommodated.

Once upon a time I was happy to have a telephone extension.

Now the hidden cables include Cat5, Cat 6, some 3 core for digital temperature sensors and a HDMI lead.

[Infrasonic]

If starting with a blank sheet of paper and say a new build house where you could influence the plans/construction I'd put a decent fibre LAN trunk in with a future proofed amount of bandwidth (100Gb+) and then use 10Gb+ SFP+/Ethernet/PoE switches as local spurs which can be easily upgraded as needed.

That way you could optically network things like 8K capable HDMI without getting into active copper for runs over 10M, network the fancy GPU in your gaming rig for when it isn't gaming, or have everyone watching their own UHD Blu Ray film from a decent NAS media server and/or online gaming without bottlenecking the LAN/WAN ...

[paulnumbers]

Try looking on You Tube at 'homelabs' or following up to date developments in networking for SOHO fibre use. Have you seen how many You Tube content creators are 4K native these days? I watch live 4K feeds all the time. LTT are 8K native now.

Right, so that's something like 40-100mbit/s. What are you going to do with the other 39900mbit/s that fibre justifies?

If you have TB's of locally stored data (like 4K Blu Ray rips...) what's the quickest way of backing it up off site which should be part of any cogent plan? Could it be a fast FTTP uplink speed perchance?

so again, that's going to be less than 3gbit/s. Are you planning on doing a fresh backup every day?

My laptops are both equipped with TB4/USB4 (40Gb) ports and I now have a 4TB TB4 NVME SSD multi partioned NTFS/EXFAT/EXT4 for multiple OS and VM backups/snapshots. The sooner I can get that all moved to a networked all NVME DAS/NAS and auto- scheduled the better.

Ok, so you're an extreme user. You're the 0.1% of network users. I'm on the network team for an American TV station. For the Paris Olympics we're only using 2x 100gig links back to the USA. It sounds like your personal bandwidth requirements might well be greater!

[paulnumbers]

If running network cable around your house, surely the true way to future proof it is to have ducting through which new cables can easily be routed ?

Yeah, that and a piece of string! I notice even BT deliver copper into houses in a nice big plastic trunk now. Surprising forethought by them.

[Infrasonic]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_i ... _bit_rates

Compression (CODECS) gets used for streaming because of lack of bandwidth on the WAN/LAN - if you have more bandwidth you can run less compression i.e a 4K Blu Ray disc versus Netflix compressed to sh*t 25Mb/s streaming.
Is a Netflix stream as good to look at as a 4K Blu Ray on a decent 10Bit HDR+ TV? No.

What's the digital equivalent of a 70mm IMAX film in resolution terms? 18K.

Audio WAV files - uncompressed.

How much WAN/LAN bandwidth would be needed to run 4/8K RAW (uncompressed) video files?
Answer - a huge amount.

There's a balance to be had between quality/pragmatism in the AV world - as the bandwidth increases for WAN/LAN capability then there is also the headroom to improve the quality to the consumer.

SaaS. i.e Cloud services. Same issues.

Ditto for backups over a LAN.
Family of four with desktops/laptops/phones etc all fighting for LAN/WAN bandwidth.
NVMe SSD's are commonplace in computers these days, as are TB4/USB4 (40Gb) ports.

There's only one way future ports are going in terms of bandwidth and that is up. Ditto for WAN/LAN bandwidth.
As the bandwidth goes up new uses like local GPU networking become feasible and will be adopted.
eGPU enclosures have been around for a few years already making use of TB3/4 and more recently USB4 and Oculink (85Gb).

[Infrasonic]

https://michael.stapelberg.ch/posts/202 ... t-upgrade/

My favorite internet service provider, init7, is rolling out faster speeds with their infrastructure upgrade. Last week, the point of presence (POP) that my apartment’s fiber connection terminates in was upgraded, so now I am enjoying a 25 Gbit/s fiber internet connection!...

[Infrasonic]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nlB73DqNFxY

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26:36 - RJ-45 Transceivers
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