Abstract: This paper explores the electrical noise immunity and noise coupling of category cables in adverse environments. For industrial environments, typical electrical noise interference would be expected to be transient in nature. Such interference would be caused by sources with intermittent and spectrally diverse signatures in the noise spectrum. It is also expected that noise sources can be quite local in nature, inducing interference along only a small portion of a comparatively long length of communication cable.
Although there are efforts in cabling standards to help reduce the effects of noise effects on cables suitable for 10Gb ethernet traffic (Alien Crosstalk), there are fewer standards that directly deal with effects on 1Gb traffic in severely noisy environments. This paper provides test results for the effect on 1Gb/s Ethernet traffic for a range of category cable designs subjected to different types of electrical noise.
