Written by Henry Franc

Cable combing or dressing creates neat, organized cables with parallel runs, while also reducing installation time. But find out how it impacts the performance of Category 6A cables.

When your cable installation is exposed and visible, such as in open, overhead cable trays or racks and cabinets, you want it to look professional and pristine. Tangled and misaligned cables are not only unsightly, but also can lead to performance issues if they’re kinked or bent.

That’s where cable combing or dressing comes in. It helps create neat, organized cables with parallel runs. It also reduces labor costs and installation time when multiple cables must be untangled and bundled during a project.

When it comes to lower grades of copper cabling, such as Category 5e and Category 6, combing has always been a regular and recommended practice during installation. But the introduction of Category 6A changed that.

How did Category 6A cables change combing practices?

While Category 6A cabling was being developed prior to approval in 2008, it brought with it higher levels of frequency and noise to support 500 MHz of data transmission bandwidth.

But noise sensitivity increases at higher frequencies. As bandwidth increased, so did the importance of controlling cable noise to ensure proper data transmission. First-generation 10GBASE-T systems were so sensitive to noise, in fact, that engineers had to take cell phones out of their pockets before entering lab spaces.

It was also discovered that running Category 6A cables and connectors in parallel was a main contributor to noise—a type of interference we now call “alien crosstalk.”

With lower grades of Category cable and connectors like Category 5e and Category 6, alien crosstalk wasn’t a problem—because it didn’t exist.

Alien crosstalk occurs when a signal on one cable (the “aggressor”) induces noise to the signal of an adjacent cable (the “victim”). Victim and aggressor signals impact each other the most when in parallel. This is why a cable’s copper wires are twisted into pairs: to balance the conductors of a pair and ensure that the differential signal remains equal and opposite. Alien crosstalk must be managed so it doesn’t cause performance issues.

It’s also different from near-end crosstalk (NEXT) and far-end crosstalk (FEXT), which occur within a single cable. Because NEXT and FEXT can be measured and predicted, they can be remediated through digital signal processing. But alien crosstalk is unpredictable interference that comes from outside the cable.

To address this noise-sensitivity issue, manufacturers tried all types of solutions and designs. They did everything from creating cables with very large ODs to using spacers that coiled around the four pairs in an attempt to separate and randomize interfering signals.

Still, due to this level of interference, many manufacturers advised against cable combing for Category 6A—and they still do today.

Cable Combing for Category 6A: yes or no?

Today, we often receive questions about cable combing. It was such a common practice with Category 5e and Category 6, but should it be done with Category 6A, given what we learned above? What do best practices dictate?

Here’s our answer: If you use Category 6A solutions from Belden, then cable combing is still fine.

These cables feature our EquiBlock™ design, which provides an equal potential barrier to minimize alien crosstalk to adjacent cables.

We also test our cables to worst-case conditions, using a combed, six-around-one configuration. Six outer cables are laid around a center cable, and cables are tied every 6 to 8 inches along the full length of the channel, bringing connectors closer together as well. Many manufacturers can’t pass six-around-one configuration with four connectors in a shortened (24 m) channel.

Belden passes this testing because its cables and connectors are designed with the best possible balance to exceed all performance characteristics and parameters specified in the Category 6A standard, including alien crosstalk, insertion loss and return loss. And our REVConnect® Connectors provide the best controlled electrical performance possible.

So go ahead—be proud of your installation work and comb your Category 6A cables from Belden if you want. In fact, we encourage it!

It’s important to note, however, that it may be problematic to comb Category 6A cables from other vendors. If another cable manufacturer advises against combing or dressing, then it’s probably wise to listen. Their Category 6A cables likely require randomization (a less tidy installation) to eliminate the potential for alien crosstalk and degraded performance.

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Written by Lauren Robeson Menting

While the supply crunch has eased a bit for some industries, logistics facilities remain busy hubs. Filled with autonomous mobile robots, automated guided vehicles, employees, and goods, there’s no shortage of activity and moving parts.

Keeping employees safe from these moving parts – and making sure damage isn’t done to your facility or the goods it stores, hampering production and delivery – is essential. Wireless connectivity solutions can help ensure that safety is maintained in material handling applications – read on to discover factors you should consider when selecting a wireless product for your facility.

Industrial vs. Commercial

You probably wouldn’t look at your home Internet service and figure the same coverage would work as well for a major facility. Likewise, you shouldn’t equip your facility with commercially available wireless radios that are synonymous more with walkie-talkies than major factories.

There are a few reasons why industrial wireless radios have the edge here:

· Robustness: Industrial radios are designed to withstand inhospitable environments. Some industrial wireless radios can also ensure adequate connectivity even in facilities that are crowded with signals.

· Integration with your PAC: A typical setup will have one primary radio that connects to your control system, with access points on mobile equipment and at other locations as your application requires. Industrial wireless radios allow for streamlined integration with your PAC, ensuring radios’ real-time data is directly transferred to your control system.

· Security: Industrial radios can provide more security than commercial models, keeping proprietary information safe and bad actors out.

Fast, Precise Connectivity

You also want to make sure that the wireless radios you choose can give your employees, control system, and other radios real-time information as to their rapidly changing location.

Industrial radios allow mobile equipment to send their location to the primary radio and other access points in real time, which helps ensure other equipment won’t hit it – and, most importantly, employees know where heavy equipment is at all times to increase their safety.

Pairing wireless radios and a functional safety protocol (such as CIP Safety or PROFIsafe) is an especially wise idea for applications involving mobile equipment.

Flexibility for the Future

Opting for a wireless radio that can be easily implemented can help keep your employees safe when new equipment is added. A streamlined installation and configuration process ensures that this work won’t fall by the wayside when adding new moving machinery.

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Written by Ciaran Burns

We’ve identified the top 3 ways Sensor to Cloud brings benefit to our industrial customers by making use of your data for better decision making, remote access and connectivity.

Now scale this data to an entire year. The amount of information is overwhelming.

To put it to work for you, it has to be tied together and have somewhere to go to be monitored, analyzed and acted upon. If the data is captured and viewed disparately, you won’t be able to discover insights, find potential failure points or manage your overall supply chain. In other words, you’ll be capturing data just for fun. (Which isn’t a good use of resources!)

Traditionally, this type of data gathering takes on a pyramid approach: A plant’s sensors and controllers (PLCs or PCs) transfer information to a central, onsite supercomputer or something similar.

There are still situations where this method is appropriate, but we’re also entering a world where it’s much simpler to connect devices to supercomputers or virtual servers that sit in the cloud. Instead of data from a factory-floor sensor going through several steps to be processed and analyzed, it’s now more common for a sensor to have its own cellular, wireless and/or wired connectivity that connects it straight to the cloud. (Quick tip: The cloud is simply a group of servers that let you store and access data and applications via the internet.)

Although its behind-the-scenes infrastructure can be somewhat complex, Sensor to Cloud brings simplicity to industrial environments. It does what its name implies: Sensor to Cloud uses sensors to accumulate data and then transmits it into a cloud computing infrastructure for information sharing, collaboration, process improvement and decision-making—even across several sites.

Sensor to Cloud brings several benefits to industrial plants; we’ve identified and summarized three of the most important here.

1. Make Better Business Decisions

In the industrial world, data is always there. Capturing the information is the first step—but it’s only helpful if it can actually be used for something.

When data is collected and shared in real time, decisions can be made on the fly to maximize efficiency, handle predictive maintenance, test different strategies, ensure quality and safety, and improve how the factory floor runs.

All the important decision-making data points a plant needs in order to make informed decisions can be provided by the network. You just need a way to access that data so it can be used to improve automation and efficiency (which is exactly what Sensor to the Cloud provides).

By capturing data in the cloud, you’ll also have access to historical information so you can look for trends and patterns, measure performance improvement or demonstrate compliance over time.

2. Improve Communication & Maintenance

Consider maintenance in the wind turbine industry: They often send technicians out in boats to perform specific upkeep on offshore wind turbines. Once the workers get to the jobsite and assess conditions, they may or may not be able to complete the tasks they were sent to do. Or what if they find something else that needs to be done as well? Because they’re offshore and have no connectivity, they often have to wait to get back into their boat and re-establish a useable connection before they can provide updates and ask questions, which creates lots of wasted time. When workers can access data via the cloud, their maintenance work can be more productive.

Sensor to Cloud also lets industrial maintenance staff know what’s happening with their devices, systems and processes at all times. Instead of requiring 24/7 monitoring by an employee, Sensor to Cloud lets you capture device data and implement automatic monitoring and analysis; the right people can be notified immediately if something isn’t performing as expected (before it negatively impacts production).

This automated capability is similar to your car’s tire pressure warning. Fifteen or 20 years ago, your car may not have told you when one of its tires needed more air. Instead, you had to manually check it when you filled up with gas or you noticed an issue. Today, your car tells you as soon as there’s a tire-pressure problem so you can address it before a tire wears prematurely, overheats or causes an accident.

3. Remote Access

COVID-19 has forced many manufacturers to do what they can remotely to minimize physical contact and maintain social distancing.

When data is captured and shared via the cloud, it can be securely accessed from anywhere at any time: from your desk at work, your living room, on the road, etc.

Remote access supported by Sensor to Cloud also lets you monitor offsite equipment performance, such as wind turbines, from your plant location (or anywhere else).

Belden Makes Sensor to Cloud Possible

Belden doesn’t talk about Sensor to Cloud in theory or through hypothetical examples: From sensors and connectivity to cloud solutions, we have the comprehensive portfolio of solutions to really make it happen. And we’re helping industrial plants around the world prepare for this shift.

Our Sensor to Cloud solutions not only help you make use of your data for better decision-making, remote access and efficient maintenance, but they can also bridge OT and IT to bring these two groups together as partners. (More about this in part two of our Sensor to Cloud blog series, coming soon!) Belden acts as your Sensor to Cloud collaborator, making it easy and streamlined for both sides of the table.

Want to learn more about Sensor to Cloud and Belden’s ability to support it? Join us for a six-part webinar series where we’ll discuss:

1. The market trends driving Sensor to Cloud—and what it takes to create a Sensor to Cloud solution
2. Standards, best practices and the importance of IO-Link in Sensor to Cloud
3. Redundancy and infrastructure
4. Data analytics and edge solutions
5. Securing sensor data
6. Managing Sensor to Cloud networks

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