I recently attended a refresher class on Cat5e/6 cabling. It was put on by Hitachi Cabling. The instructor was a member of the TIA & IEEE standards boards, so basically one of the people responsible for implementing cable standards. One thing that she(yes she, very sharp by the way) mentioned as a big myth was how power affects data transmissions. We were informed that power has no affect on data. It runs at a much lower hertz, and affects the positive and negative voltage equally, thus canceling it out. I specifically asked her if she was telling use that having cat5 cable in proximaty to power does not affect it and the answers was no. Kind of goes against what they have been telling us for the last 10 years, but this was from the source, so I gotta beleive her. She did say locating equipment such as switches and servers close to transformers and such could cause some noise, and also the main reason to aviod Cat5 and power contact was for safety. She told me would send me a white sheet that address the subject. When I get it, I will post a link.

Z-man
Avaya SME Authorized Partner
www.omniofficetech.com