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1.4mm Thick Gigabit Ethernet Cable
TheIonix writes "Flat network cables aren't anything new, but I'm pretty sure ones like this are. Japanese accessory king Elecom today announced the "LD-VAPF/SV05" network cabling, coming in at 1.4mm thick." Also here's their press release if you can read Japanese.
Google Translation of press release.
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Babelfish translation...
Shame on me for responding to my own post, but I wanted to note that DeCorp also makes that flatwire product for audio, video and electrical wiring as well.
While WIFI would be good to expand on, some of us must use cable no matter what comes out. I work in a building where we can't have any wireless device, cell phones, pda, pages, tape recorders, etc... So cable like this can come in handy, especially when we are so limited.
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It's interesting because fiber is pretty damned sensitive to things like going around corners and being run over with office chairs and a whole lot of other things can make it a challenge to deploy to the desktop. That's why gig over cat 5e is way more popular these days then over fibre. Outside of the machine room fibre isn't a popular solution. And definatly if you're going to run it around window tracks or under carpet with roller chairs, you don't want to use fib...
Min
On the whole, I find that I prefer Slashdot posts to twitter ones because I don't get limited to 140 chars before
The U in UTP is Unshielded. Standard Ethernet doesn't use shielding. But it does use the twists in the cabling to combat interference.
It looks like this flat cable is only for very small sections, for which you can probably get away without the twists if you've got another way to handle the interference.
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The twistedness actually is there to cancel out crosstalk. There isn't really any shielding for RF (either receiving or sending). The twistedness attempts to create pairs of wires that always appear to be 90 degrees in reference to the other wire. Any PCB designer knows that to get the least interference from lines, you try to cross them at 90 degrees, so they only "overlap" at a very small point. Parallel lines act like capacitors to eachother, and that's why we get crosstalk.
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Last year (during summer) when I was in Japan, I bought a bunch of Elecom cables (CAT6 though, but the same thin design). They also sold CAT5 (10/100) cable at the same store I got my CAT6, so I'm assuming the real "news" is that they now have gigabit-capable CAT5 cable in the thin variety, not that flat cable is something new, or that even gigabit varieties of flat cable are new.
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I'm still not sure I'm okay with the potential for interfreaence in these... it's just too thin... I'd love to see how many u can stack on top of one another before they break.
As long as the cable is still composed of twisted pairs (which they must be to be considered category 5), interference shouldn't be an issue. This is why cat5 is not shielded.
Two conductors of small cross-section in intimate proximity carrying equal currents in opposite directions make a very poor antenna.
..... the whole of engineering is really just about finding the best compromises between incompatible "ideal" requirements to produce a solution that will work under real-world conditions.}
Small cross-section isn't a problem. Opposite directions are easy to arrange: all you need is a resistor on the far end, bigger than the resistance of the cable {which depends on the cross-section; more area == less resistance}. Equal currents require differential drive arrangements {one goes high while other goes low -- think motor reversing circuit -- not hard} and that the terminating resistor on the far end is smaller than the input resistance of the receiver. {Spot the conflicting requirements here
Intimate proximity is traditionally ensured by twisting the wires together, but bonding them side-by-side in a flat configuration works almost as well, if you can live with the fact that there is actually going to be some directional antenna functionality, but it's very directional.
Twisting helps to cancel this out somewhat, by ensuring that any radiated fields tend to cancel one another out: somewhere further along the cable, a signal will be emitted with the opposite phase; and if the twists are close enough that the conductor is in intimate proximity to its opposite counterpart, the two will cancel out.
Exactly how close is "intimate" depends on the wavelength, of course.
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Well, wireless lans are at a much lower power output than cell phones, and they are typically operated much further from your brain (although with the wifi voip phones this doesn't apply).
If you are worried about wireless, move to the mountains or put on a tinfoil hat.
Just in case you are wondering where you can get these cables, they should be available for pre-order from our site within 24 hours:
http://shinza.com/
Availability is expected within 3-4 weeks.
Ethernet cable is a generic term referring to
all three, plus the variants. Just as car is a
generic term referring to a large class of vehicules.
But its not twisted pairs, its 8 wires running parallel to each other, like an ATA cable. And ATA cables only work because every other one is a ground so that the transmitting lines don't interfere with each other. So, technically, this isn't CAT 5 (or 5e or 6 or anything else classified by the IEEE)