Home network cable and screens

[fourtwentyfour]

I would like to increase the number of network sockets in my home, there are adequate cable channels in the walls. Currently there is some old cat 5 which seems adequate and is easy to work with.

I notice that faster cables have screens on the copper pairs and a further one on the whole cable.

My question is, how are these screens terminated?

Are they cut short and left floating, or must one end go to ground somewhere? If floating how does the screen work as a shield? I haven't found any wall sockets or cable plugs that show a ground terminal.

Is it worth considering fibre within the home, yet, for internet and tv?

Thanks

[servodude]

Pretty sure on CAT6 there's a shield that can get grounded (on one end only hopefully)- which is the difference betwixt STP and UTP cables
but I can't remember there being a connection other than the normal RJ45 pins for this to happen

[paulnumbers]

Is it worth considering fibre within the home, yet, for internet and tv?

Thanks

I wouldn't bother. Cat6a will do 10gbit/s for 100 meters. A 4k stream from netflix is only around 25mbit/s. At the risk of being ridiculed in the future, I see no reason why you'd want more than 1gbit/s never mind 10gbit/s.

[Infrasonic]

Over short distances CAT cables can go over their specified max throughput.

It's worth having plenty of bandwidth on your trunk LAN so you can throw large uncompressed files over it efficiently if needed.
For instance there are solid state NVMe DAS/NAS' coming to market now that can easily saturate Gb, they are coming with dual 10Gb and even TB4 (40Gb) ports.

I'm just looking at a similar situation in my flat and 10Gb is the minimum I'm looking at for the trunk side of things, even if individual kit may only have Gb ports.
An HDMI 2.1 cable has a bandwidth of 48Gb for reference.

The higher the rating on the cable the more CMR RF rejection there is and the more critical the ground is. Terminating Cat 7/8 for instance needs much more attention to the 'hygiene' of the connectors.

Fibre is doable and the economics are lowering all the time but is difficult to do DIY as the termination hygiene there has to be pretty spot on unless you run ready made/terminated cables into things like keystone jacks/wall boxes et al.
You can mix fibre/CAT via specialist plugs.

There's a ton of really good YT videos by networking pro's on how to do all this and the gotchas to watch out for when planning fibre/CAT, when to get an installer in versus DIY etc.

[Urbandreamer]

I notice that faster cables have screens on the copper pairs and a further one on the whole cable.

My question is, how are these screens terminated?

This is a very unusual system for Ethernet, as the plugs and sockets don't really accommodate it.

Cat 6 usually has a whole cable screen. The plugs and sockets have metal bits, not the pins, that come into contact. Shielded connectors.
This screen is earthed at both ends, effectively creating a short circuit for magnetic eddy currents.

Magnetic fields are not the only source of noise. Noise can also be communicated by capacitance or by radio waves.
The solution for that is screens around each twisted pair connected at only one end to zero volts. However the Ethernet standard use of the RJ45 consists of differential pairs. There is no means of connecting these screens when using standard Ethernet.

[Infrasonic]

https://www.reddit.com/r/HomeNetworking ... ?rdt=36427

[fourtwentyfour]

Thank you for the interesting answers.

[jaizan]

Cat6a will do 10gbit/s for 100 meters. A 4k stream from netflix is only around 25mbit/s. At the risk of being ridiculed in the future, I see no reason why you'd want more than 1gbit/s never mind 10gbit/s.

I don't see it either, however, I remember a friend once saying having 48kb of RAM in a computer is a gimmick and you will never need more than that.
He's since started an electronics company and made 8 figures from it, so his judgement isn't always wrong.