Dear Community Members,
I am after some help and advice for the building of a new home network.
I am soon to receive Gigabit Fibre Optic FTTP internet in the UK after years of working with a slow copper based ISP.
This change now means that it's time to rebuild my internal network to be able to cope with the increased bandwidth.
Having done much research, It seems that the most suitable network cable to use for the project is doing to be either cat 6 or cat 6a.
The reason for 6a being a potential option is that I will have a handful of runs which will be of 100m (due to impassable walls and convoluted routes which will need to be taken…).
Arguably, for 1 Gigabit, cat 6 would be fine across these distances from what I read, however, the new ISP is already connected to a 40Gigabit back hall and is stating that they are planning to offer 10 Gigabit internet in the next 2-5 years.
Clearly cat 6 would not cut 10 Gigabit for distances over 100 metres.
In essence, I'm trying to be reasonably, but not overly future proof. I know that the pricing for 10 Gigabit switches etc. is prohibitive currently, though this may come down soon and I would rather not have to re-cable in the next 5 years.
Here comes my difficulty and lack of knowledge.
Looking into cat 6a cables, I have identified that Nexans cat 6a F/UTP or F/FTP appear to be very good, however, the foiling introduces the problem of needing to Ground/Earth the network and this is where looking online has caused me to become very confused as to the right way to do this.
I do not want to put in such a system to find that I have actually caused more trouble than I have solved with issues such as the cable becoming an antenna or by creating a ground loop.
The network will be structured as follows:
1 Gigabit router with a cat 6a cable connecting to a switch (possibly with all cables going into a patch panel before the switch).
From the switch, further cat 6a cables will run to various parts of the house to wall outlets.
It seems like the Nexans system has many shielded outlets etc. which make that part of the job easy.
The switch itself will have a power chord attached which (being in the UK) will have a ground/earth wire.
The question is,
1) Will the ground wire in the power lead of the switch ground/earth the whole system?
2) If this does not count as earthing/grounding for the network, what else do I need to do and how do I ground the network?
3) If I add a dedicated ground to the system, where do I put this and how do I connect it and make sure that everything is grounded? I have read some posts that warn about not having multiple ground/earth points in the system as this can cause issues.
As you can tell, while I have a good general understanding, I am unsure of the intricacies of earthing and am keen to do a good job. If you can help with my general understanding and my grounding earthing issues, that would be perfect.
It may be that I need a special switch with a ground connection for example. If so, if you could point me to such a switch and instruct me how one connects this to ground in a home environment, that would be great.
Very many thanks for your assistance.