Bought some CCA CAT5e cable. Return it?

rubberduck · 6 Jul 2020 at 19:34

Hi.

As title, I purchased a cheapo external 100m CAT5e spool from eBay without doing my research, I intended to use it for a couple of 30m runs, clipped to the side of my house - no POE.

Will it be ok for gigabit speeds? Or should I see if I can send it back and get some proper copper cable?

Caged · 6 Jul 2020 at 19:43

It will be fine. I wouldn't use it for long runs of high power PoE devices, and I wouldn't use it for things that send data over Cat5e cabling but aren't ethernet (e.g. HDMI senders), but it won't be an issue for what you're using it for. The postage involved in returning it will probably make it not worth returning even if you do decide to buy copper for the current task.

Sparx · 6 Jul 2020 at 20:32

Agreed ^^ If you're planning on doing any of the above, then yeah get proper copper cable instead.

But if it's just standard PC networking and no POE stuff, then it should be fine. But otherwise CCA cable is best avoided.

Avalon · 6 Jul 2020 at 23:32

Given it’s likely stupidly cheap and how much agro it would be to re-pull/pin an external run if it causes issues, personally I would just replace it with something not awful and do the job properly. That said for basic gigabit, it’s likely fine, I just hate the stuff with a passion.

bledd · 6 Jul 2020 at 23:43

Bin it and stop using eBay

RichL · 7 Jul 2020 at 18:28

The main investment is the time to install it and terminate it properly. Don't waste time with super cheap cable, it's a false economy.

rubberduck · 7 Aug 2020 at 23:21

Just to close the loop on this as OP... Have installed some 30m runs with my CCA and am getting 930 Mb/s Duplex... To be honest other than being CCA, the actual quality of the cable was pretty good (Eagle brand) in term of the thickness of the conductors and twisting of the pairs - better than some full copper cables I have inspected. It was an easy cable to work with due to the light weight and clipped nicely to brickwork.... Although non-stranded cable is sub-optimal for terminating as RJ45 I experience no problems in terminating well over 20 RJ45 crimps... I would say terminating to a face plate was not very good as the conductors sheared off a couple of time - was my first time doing this so maybe would have worked if I had done a better job of straightening the wires prior to punching them and/or having a better punch tool. The issues I experience with the face plate alone would make me steer away from CCA in the future as clearly copper would have not had these problems

So overall, happy I went ahead and installed my CCA cable, as I just need gigabit (no PoE) which this does with ease... In the future though I certainly would go full copper, purely because of the issues with the ductility of aluminium compared to copper when punching down for face plates.