Strangled ethernet and coaxial cable

Adrian M

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Jun 4, 2013
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We are currently in progress of building a house and it seems that they kinda strangled the coaxial cable and ethernet cat. 6e cable with wire as can be seen in the below picture:

IMG_3971.jpg


Is this something I should worry about? I don't want any signal loss or for it to simply not work. The cables will be buried in plaster so better to know now than afterwards.

Thank you.
 

jeff-j

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Dec 13, 2013
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I would replace the cables, it looks like that wire tie might of broken the cable. If this is getting buried in plaster, I would then route the cables in a plastic conduit this way in the future if there is an issue with the cable you won't need to bust up plaster to replace the cable. Also be sure it leave a pull string in the cable.
 
if they are cables, I'd be worried.. doubly so since you should not put plain cables in concrete. (at least in here)
if they are conduits with cables inside them, I would be less worried since cables would be fine inside it.

Yes, the cables could work but will they work at 100% capacity without errors? likely not, will they "work" with plain pair tester/normal signal, likely yes.
will they work as well after 5 years? even less likely.
I would not categorize that cat cable over 10Mbit/sec due to hot it's handled. (yeah, not cat5 with is 100Mbit) It could work as 1Gbit or 100Mbit but... I would not expect more than "it works" based on visual inspection.


and as side note, cat 6e doesn't exist, 5e does as does 6a but not 6e, that is besides the point though.
 
Coming from someone experienced in cable installations the tightness of that cable tie on that cat5e/cat6 cable is concerning, the fact that it goes into a tight bend makes it even worse.

On the off chance that the cable still can handle gigabit speeds now, it has very low chance of staying that way.

Replace both cables, burry it in plastic conduit (the gray grade PVC for low voltage is so inexpensive there is no reason not to). Try to go a size bigger conduit then you think you need as you never know what you may want to add in the future.

While building a house, in 2017 it is a very very good idea to wire all phone/cable/lan cable into a structured media box. This will make an future changes much much more convenient. The house i bought had been switched from local Cable to Satellite a good 2-3 times by previous owners and the coax was a complete mess. Ended up redoing damn near every ft of coax cable in that house and put both it and phone/internet into a structured media panel.