CCA shouldn’t be used anywhere ever. It’s garbage cable for garbage people who will pinch a penny and end up spending ten times that in dealing with the issues and the eventual replacement.
Comment on I spent ~$35 on new cables and my LAN speed increased 6x
RelativeArea0@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Also learned this the hard way, when i was starting my “homelab” , I bought a box of (not knowingly that its bad) cheap CCA(copper clad alum) cat6 cables and im wondering why are my access points not negotiating to gigabit, turns out cca are trash and shouldn’t be used on POE or even on high speed trunks, learned my lesson now and swapped my cables to pure copper, they are more expensive like 100$ more expensive but at least they do the job.
catloaf@lemm.ee 1 month ago
TCB13@lemmy.world 1 month ago
It depends: lemmy.world/comment/11680250
TCB13@lemmy.world 1 month ago
CCA wasn’t probably your issue there, CCA is actually becoming the standard everywhere because copper is way too expensive and to be fair not needed with modern hardware.
You most likely issue with that CCA is the AWG size you picked, cheap cable is usually 24, 26 or even 28 AWG and those will be bad
If you want PoE or anything gigabit or above you need to pick 23 AWG. This is considerably cheaper than full copper and it will work fine for the max. rated 100m. Either way, cheap 26 AWG should be able to deliver gigabit and PoE at short distances like 20 meters or so.
Another important thing is to make sure your terminations are properly done and the plugs are good. Meaning, no Cat5e connectors should be used, always use staggered ones:
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RelativeArea0@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Thanks, I think I got 24awg cca before I swapped them to pure copper, and now I also think, I wanna re crimp all of my connectors using staggered ones lol
TCB13@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Staggered will reduce the failure rate by a lot, specially if you’re into gigabit speeds or anything above it. Although I know from experience that you can get gigabit on non-staggered connectors it won’t always happen on the first try. On long distances the noise caused by having the wires side by side may also cause problems.