Mega Category Madness

A funny thing happened in network cabling sometime in the last, oh heck I can’t recall exactly when. We had a marketing genius take over for the fine folks at the Telecommunications Industry Association(TIA). Apparently these fine, highly qualified and educated folks, (some rumored to be actual electrical engineers), were not making new standards fast enough for our intrepid marketer! In case you detect an edge in my voice, you would be correct. What, you may ask, has gotten my glasses all foggy?

To be honest I am pretty tired of hearing, “The other guy’s cable says 350 MHz; why doesn’t yours?”

Sometimes, in my more sarcastic moments, I find myself thinking: “To heck with it lets put fuzzy bunnies on the darn boxes and cables and call it good.” Yes I am being extremely sarcastic. Extra sauce today if you will. However, there is merit to this rant. A Category 5e cable labelled 350 MHz is worth no more than one labelled 100 MHz. And so long as our fuzzy bunny cable is tested through 100 MHz, it might be worth more than both because it costs more to print fuzzy bunnies on boxes and cables.

Hopefully by now I have a little bit of your attention. Above I mention TIA, those funny people who decide what exactly is a category cable. These fine folks came together, probably argued and fought, and eventually settled on a standard and published it. The standard is TIA/EIA-568, with the most current revision being C. In truth the standards define a lot of physical properties. Some are of the overtly physical variety, and some are more like physics, or electrical properties to narrow down. In there, one finds specifications about these megahertz thingies and different categories.

  • Cat5e – 100 MHz
  • Cat6 – 250 MHz
  • Cat6a – 500 MHz

When the folks at TIA release such standards they define target/acceptable parameters across a range that begins somewhere near zero and persists through the numbers above for a given cat cable. They very clearly list acceptable loss values, in decibels, for the entire frequency range. Companies like Fluke use these standards to design and program their network testers. Other companies like Intel, HP or Broadcom use these standards to design their network hardware.

So, the standards that we are supposed to follow in order to be allowed to call a cable Category 5e, 6 or 6a are also the standards to which the hardware makers also adhere. That being said, if you were Fluke, would you spend money making sure a network tester tested outside of industry standards? If all the hardware vendors build to these specifications, how exactly does performing outside of them benefit you? For that matter how on Earth does one certify a cable is good to an imaginary standard that no real tester even entertains? Cat5e’s electrical properties are defined up to 100 MHz. End of discussion. To see a higher MHz defined, one must change Categories to 6 at which point why not just call it a Cat6 cable? They are worth more money. The same can be said for Cat6 vs Cat6a.

If you were in business, why would you sell an entire product category for significantly less than it was worth?

Oxygen Free Copper. What is it?

Cables are boring; there, I said it. So how does one market something that is inherently not that exciting? I grew up deep into computers, networks and programming. I can remember the birth of so many interesting things that cables have facilitated, but I can never recall coming home shouting about a C13 to NEMA 5-15P. Okay, I admit, even us geeks would call this a computer power cord. So how does one go about making these things interesting? And what is really important?

One of the biggest, annoyingly brilliant deals in copper cables was to declare a cable has oxygen free copper (OFC). This is genius because one takes a simple term most didn’t think was worth mentioning and it becomes some marketing juggernaut. Hey, In most cases we say it too. Copper cables are oxygen free. So what exactly is going on there?

Copper is a base element (Cu on the periodic table). So how does copper get oxygen? Well it’s not like we mine pure copper from the ground. There are impurities in the ore itself. We also introduce impurities when we refine the copper ore. Typically some oxygen gets into the mix at the refinement stage. Depending on the requirements of the final product, the refinement methods and process can vary.

C10100 (trade name: Oxygen-Free-Electronic) the final portion of it’s process occurs in an airspace devoid of oxygen with rules so stringent even silver is considered an impurity. Keep in mind this stuff is going into places like vacuums inside a particle accelerator or a CPU where any impurity can matter. I think this might be overkill for speaker wire. Maybe I am wrong though, it does have a 101% IACS conductivity rating. Wait, is this like giving 110% of oneself? I love giving more than all

C10200 (trade name: Oxygen-Free) differs in that silver is not considered an impurity and it can have more oxygen, by a power of 50 which means very little when it’s 0.0005% vs 0.001% and we are using it for speakers…

C11000, is called Electrolytic-Tough-Pitch (ETP), relaxes the rules even further. It typically can equal more than all in conductivity as well. This is the copper that finds itself all over normal applications. (Shut up, a particle accelerator is not normal!) Most of what is out there and marketed as oxygen free copper is this stuff here. I am sure that there are some cables out there which are made with C10200 and there always will be because some people will buy them just like people keep thinking a Cat5e cable marketed as 250MHz is better than 100MHz. Side note on a completely different rant if that 250MHz Cat5e was so amazing they would have printed Cat6 on the packaging and jacked the price…. (Though I think I might be due a rant on this so we’ll see.)

What really matters is that your cables, wires and cords that should be copper are indeed copper, not aluminum, and that they are uniformly and well constructed. You need to choose a cable that is of the correct materials and size for the intended use. If you are unsure about the gauge you need for a 100 foot run delivering 100 watts to a two way in your garden, don’t fret we have Tech Support to help you out.


sources:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxygen-free_copper
alloys.copper.org/alloy/C10100
alloys.copper.org/alloy/C10200
alloys.copper.org/alloy/C11000