This is going to be a little long winded...
This past week, I neatened up the telephone wiring here @ the house. I have been wanting to do this for a while now and decided to stop procrastinating.
Since my cabling work at my church is done, I grabbed a used pull box of Systimax CAT3 gray plenum cable and got to work. I ran out of cable and went back the following day to grab another box. I purposely grabbed the newest box which was labeled "Commscope" as opposed to "Systimax" and headed home.
When I pulled the end of the cable out of the box, I could not help but notice that the outer jacket had a "ribbed" feel to it as opposed to the "smooth" feel of the older cable.
I grabbed my Cyclops and removed about 3" of jacketing.
Talk about a letdown, the wire insulation was translucent, making it difficult to differentiate between the W/O and W/BR pairs. Even worse, the conductors within each pair were twisted ala CAT5e. The conductors in the older cable have almost no twisting...and...have insulation that makes color identification very simple.
I can't help but roll my eyes when I look at the Commscope bulletin from 2010 that advises that the Systimax name was being replaced with the Commscope name on all CAT3 hardware. Commscope stated that product codes and whatnot was going to remain the same. The only changes were the name/logo on the box and the outer jacket.
I guess this is supposed to be progress.
