News / Hyperline

Copper cable surfing: Television meets UTP

by Brian Milligan
Courtesy of Cabling Installation & Maintenance Magazine

An emerging technology opens up new installation possibilities-and plenty of questions.

The debate is on for distributing television over unshielded twisted-pair cable (UTP). But as its merits and possibilities are weighed, some remain skeptical about the cost savings it represents, and just how quickly end users will seek it out. << Read More

Broadcast television has VHF and UHF frequencies. The cable TV spectrum, however, runs continuously from 54 MHz to 860 MHz, without any gaps. Television over UTP technology can handle frequencies from 5 MHz to 860 MHz, meaning 134 analog TV channels or 402 standard digital channels.

Testing guidelines for 10-GbE over twisted pairs

by Hugo Draye
Courtesy of Cabling Installation & Maintenance Magazine

Certifying links for alien-crosstalk performance is more likely to be a sample process than a simple one.

The IEEE standards review board approved the standard for 10-Gbit/sec Ethernet over twisted-pair copper cabling (10GBase-T) on June 8, and we expect that the 802.3 standards documents will be updated and published sometime this year.

This article will provide a background and overview of the performance requirements for the twisted-pair cabling and methods to measure and certify the performance of the installed cabling system.

Field certification of twisted-pair cabling for 10GBase-T consists of two phases. First, all cabling links must meet the performance specified by the in-channel test parameters currently specified in the TIA/EIA-568B document for Category 6 or in the ISO 11801 standard. They are: insertion loss, return loss, pair-to-pair near-end crosstalk (NEXT), power-sum NEXT, pair-to-pair equal-level far-end crosstalk (ELFEXT), power-sum ELFEXT, propagation delay, length, delay skew, and wiremap. << Read More

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