[SOLVED] Confused about U/FTP and keystone jacks

[joemorris86]

I've recently had my house rewired and the electrician has used 6A U/FTP cable.

I was looking at buying some RJ45 ends and some keystone jacks for a patch panel but I cannot see any that are specifically intended for U/FTP.

I don't want to go and order the wrong bits. Do I just order ones that are labelled as 6A FTP?

Would appreciate any tips. Thank you.

 

[bill001g]

It would have made things simpler if he had installed U/UTP cable. The shielding does nothing without it being connected to a special ground. It really is only used in data centers where they have special ground bars on all the racks.

Unless you are going to run 10gbit today I would use cat5e keystones and replace them at a later date when you need 10g. What you will do is cut back the foil and ignore it. You still need to be careful to untwist as little wire as possible. It will be kinda tedious.

If you want to use cat6a you can do the same and ignore the foil. In theory the foil running non grounded can pick up interference but in a home environment it likely makes no difference and it is pretty much impossible to run a special ground wire to each outlet. Note this is not the same as the ground lead on your electrical plugs even though it would eventually run to the same rod that is pounded into the ground near your house.

 

[joemorris86]

Thank you for the reply.

Happy to follow your recommendations. When I'm looking for 5E keystones, I seem to able to pick between UTP, FTP, screened and unscreened.

Which one should I go for? Sorry I am very out of my depth here. Since I will be ignoring the foil am I looking for UTP?

 

[bill001g]

Yes standard UTP. You need nothing special and it will likely even run at 10gbit on cat5e keystones....it is just not guaranteed to run say when you have very long runs.

 

[joemorris86]

Thank you for all your help. I can stop stressing over this now