It has been quite a long time since I checked into prices for data cable. This is strictly an FMI (for my information) act.

I know that plenum rated cable is more expensive than riser cable, but, when comparing prices of…..SYSTIMAX® 360™ GigaSPEED® X10D 1091 Non-Plenum Cable, 1000 Ft Box against the price of SYSTIMAX® 360™ GigaSPEED® X10D 2091 Plenum Cable, 1000 Ft Box.....I was surprised by the fact that the plenum costs about twice as much as the riser variant.

I don't remember the price differential being so wide. Has it been that way for very long?

Way back when it was a couple of cents per foot for cat 3 and maybe 8 or 10 cents for cat 5 or 5E. There was always a bigger spread for the "newer" cable.

There is zero performance improvement and I was actually told by a chemist once that by the time any PVC in data cable hurts you something else will have already done you in!

Way back when our choice of Cat 5 cable was PCV or Teflon.

Yes and no. Traditionally for pricing I always figured CMP as twice what CM or CMR costs. If I could get it for less, it's money in my pocket. Price depends on the manufacturer, what it is and who you get it from. This appears to be COMMSCOPE CAT6A? Gonna pay through the nose for big names to begin with. Add that it's the newest that probably they don't sell much of compared to CAT6.

For most cables I always stocked plenum because the price difference was minimal over riser- except in the case of data UTP cables. There, you only want to use plenum where you have to.

-Hal

When I reworked the cabling @ my Church a while back, I used CMP....even for the 25 pair CAT3 backbones. CMR would have been fine, but, I went plenum. If I was doing the work today, I'd probably go with riser.

I did use the 2091 cable for the data runs. Went through one reel and started in on a second to complete everything.

One of my goals in 2019 is to run the 6A here at home. The data feed from the basement up to my bedroom is on existing 2-pair CAT3. Verizon just bumped my FiOS Internet speed up to 75 megs. The best I can get from my Linksys router is about 50 up & 30 down. If I plug the Linksys directly into the FiOS modem, it's full speed ahead.

I get over 200 here from Optimum over CAT5e. Don't know what to do with it. It's only so fast this page can load.

-Hal

PING: 28
⬇ 17.4 Mb/s
⬆ 0.7 Mb/s
Jitter 4 ms

The love of Cat 0 to Cat 3 to wireless...but as Hal say's...fast enough to load this page.

CAT5 would suffice for sure. Because I already have 6A available, purchasing CAT5 seems like an unnecessary expense.

Keystones from Cheap to Expensive

My house is a mix of cat5, 5E and two runs of 6. The two runs of 6 connect the two switches to the router. The majority is 5e, a few runs are some older teflon based cat5. I scored a few full boxes of teflon cat5 on Craigslist for 25 bucks -for 3 boxes- from some installer that had it kicking around collecting dust. It was labelled "Digital Equipment Corp" if that's any indication of how old it is. All my equipment is gigabit, and my service from comcast is "300 down and 10 up". On any given jack I test between 275-305 down and 12 up. I tend to think the DEC cable, while being older and rated as cat5, is probably overbuilt anyway. It has held up well. I've run tests between jacks with some software I downloaded and I get better than 900 in both directions from PC to PC. At those speeds, the hardware in the PC becomes the limiting factor, and not the cabling. I use Homeless Despot keystone jacks and plates, my switches are TP-link (2- 24 port switches), and my router is a TP-link. The switches I got used on flea bay, the router I bought new on Amazon. We use a ton of bandwidth in my house and this admittedly cheapskate setup has never let me down. The only issue I've had was the router overheated and shut down because my sister piled clothes on top of it. It has since been wall mounted so that can't happen again.

Hey Chris!

Doesn't H.D. sell Leviton products? If so, it should be the same items found at You Do It Electronics.

HD has not sold Leviton around here for several years. It's now their house brand CE Tech or something like that.

You can tell how long it has been since I purchased voice/data products from HD.

Jeff is right. It's their "house" brand, CE tech. Some of it is ok, some is crap. I've found that their keystone plates and jacks are pretty decent. I wouldn't use them professionally, but for residential stuff, they are more than adequate. I've had good luck with their datacom stuff, no problems with fitment or bad connections or premature wear.

On the flip side, I bought a CE branded roll of quad wire they had on clearance, and I quickly found out why. I'd never use it for phones or anything, but I figured I could use it for various projects. That is, until I had this weird feeling about this roll of wire and put a magnet near it. The magnet stuck right to the roll. I do my best to avoid CCA, but copper clad steel was a new one to me.

Could use the wire as a grounding electrode for an electronic device.

I've got some quad and CAT 3 2pr, probably some 4pr too. If anyone wants it I'd sell for what I have in it plus shipping. I bought it some time back so it ought to be cheaper than what todays prices are. If there's any interest I can see what I've got and what I'd have to have for it.

When you're buying Home-Grade Data cable from places like HD, Lowes or the Dollar Store you have to watch out for the Chinese counterfeit.

What Belden has to say about it.

2-pair is just about gone from the market.

The last time I purchased CommScope 4-pair CAT3 cable, I found out that the company no longer manufactures low pair count CAT3. Now they take CAT5 cable that fails testing....label it as CAT3 and sells it as such.

It works out well if terminating to 110 blocks/panels, but requires a bit more work to terminate to 66 blocks as the pairs are twisted much more than old school CAT3.

The top picture is a comparison of the pairs in the new (grey) and old (white) cables.
The bottom picture compares the jacket labels.

Ever use a scrap piece of bonded Cat 6 for a temporary x-connect?

Can't say that I have. I only have two installs to my name, so, I have a good supply of excess x-connect wire. (a tip of the hat to Ed V. for offering to sell me various cabling products over the years).

I. HATE. BONDED.

What's PCV? Or was that PVC?

PCV is the knock-off cable from China.

Oh right, the stuff where you only get 775 feet in a1000 foot box with arbitrary footage marks?

Counterfeit cable has been a problem. A few years ago, someone found counterfeit cable with copper plated steel conductors. The outer jacket was suspect as well.

Wiring made in China isn't always counterfeit. Commscope, last I knew, moved production of riser-rated cable to China while keeping production of plenum cable in the US.

The upshot was to purchase cable from trusted/authorized sources to minimize the chance of running into substandard product.

The company I'm working for now doesn't stock anything. I mean NOTHING. They buy everything on a per-job basis, and God forbid that I have a system down or need to replace a phone. The customer has to just wait until they order the part, usually from Amazon. It's not uncommon for people to wait a week for a replacement power supply. All they're interested in doing is scaring customers into buying their hosted IP crap. It's a joy being face-to-face with the customer in those instances.

Anyway, the same applies with cable, and they buy the cheapest thing that they can find on Amazon. The last project we did yielded us four boxes of "CAT5e" cable, PVC (there aren't any plenum environments here). The boxes were no-name, no UL, ETL or other approvals, Chinese made and they put mod plugs on each end of the 1,000 foot box. How nice of them. It was terrible. It knotted about every ten feet, so someone had to stand there and pull it out/straighten it for the puller. The jacket was soft and snagged on just about everything. One cable failed completely after installation, with all four pairs being shorted. It couldn't have happened on a simple run. Oh no... It was in a large retail store with 15 foot ceilings, all the way across the place. Their bargain $45.00 Chinese knock-off crap ended up costing the labor for two men to go back and replace the run. Who knows how long the rest of the runs will hold up?

Not quite as bad, but...

Back in the 1980's I was running Service and Installs for the US West Federal POTS contract and one day I was dispatched on an Emergency call to a USDA office in Enterprise, Oregon...about 325 miles away, for a system down. Apparently, the local power company was working on a pole near by when an "oops" happened. The TII Model 428 Transient Voltage Surge Suppressor took the hit and protected the Eagle One KSU.

I removed the protector, plugged the KSU directly into the dedicated/isolated AC. After verify the KSU & Programming was okay I plugged in the bad protector and notified the warehouse that they needed to mail out a new surge suppressor and left for home. That item was not a stock item. We only had them for new installs.

That sounds like us now. "Oh the paging adapter that we always use, no we don't have any spares in stock they are all for installs".

How can cable be sold/used if there is no UL/ETL approval? Wouldn't an inspector fail the job?

Anything can be sold. And I doubt any inspector is going to look closely at the tiny printing on the cable, if they know enough to look at all. All they are interested in is that plenum cable is used where required.

-Hal

I was working at a new hospital where the inspector tagged the speakers because they were not UL listed (not my job).

I would assume that since the inspector approves a job and his name is on the line they might look closer on some job site then others?
A new Hospital might get more scrutiny then a Ma n' Pa store in the 'hood.

So, an unapproved cable could easily be installed where a permit was not pulled.
Also, UL image can easily be downloaded and attached to anything:

Interesting read that puts it bluntly: https://www.chinalawblog.com/2014/0...r-china-manufacturer-do-it-yourself.html

Excerpt:
"I am guessing that the Chinese manufacturer got the project by underbidding based on its plan to forge UL certification."