Which is better — UTP or FTP

UTP and FTP are types of patch cord, a twist­ed-pair net­work cable designed for lay­ing a local net­work between com­put­ers, servers and switch­ing equip­ment. They dif­fer pri­mar­i­ly in design.

So:

1. 1. UTP (Unshield­ed Twist­ed Pair) — unshield­ed. Usu­al­ly con­sists of eight cores, com­bined into four twist­ed pairs. Each core is cov­ered with PVC insu­la­tion and they are all packed in a PVC cam­bric sheath;

1. 1. FTP (Foiled Twist­ed Pair) — shield­ed. Between the cur­rent-car­ry­ing cores — usu­al­ly eight, com­bined into four twist­ed pairs — and the sheath is an alu­minum foil screen. It is designed to pro­tect against elec­tro­mag­net­ic inter­fer­ence.

At first glance, FTP is bet­ter than UTP. But not every­thing is so sim­ple. Let’s fig­ure out which wire is bet­ter to use in dif­fer­ent sit­u­a­tions.

What to choose — FTP or UTP?

All shield­ed cables, and FTP is no excep­tion, require the shield to be ground­ed. More­over, it must be con­nect­ed to the “ground” at least at two points — at the begin­ning of the line and its end.

Oth­er­wise, there will be even more inter­fer­ence than usu­al. An unground­ed or improp­er­ly ground­ed shield acts as an anten­na that picks up exter­nal elec­tro­mag­net­ic fields. As a result, data trans­mis­sion over such a cable can occur with peri­od­ic sig­nal loss or dis­tor­tion.

Ground­ing on net­work cables can be done in two ways. The first option is to sol­der both ends of the screen to a com­mon ground bus. It is not very cor­rect from the point of view of elec­tri­cians, but accept­able. The sec­ond is the use of switch­ing equip­ment (servers, net­work cards, routers and routers) with sup­port for port ground­ing. This is the most cor­rect option. Nev­er­the­less, this tech­nique is quite expen­sive, and RJ-45 con­nec­tors should be used appro­pri­ate­ly, in a met­al case, which will be used to con­nect the ground.

As a result, the scope of FTP cables is lim­it­ed to high­ly pro­fes­sion­al net­works where the max­i­mum pro­tec­tion of the trans­mit­ted sig­nal is required — and nei­ther mon­ey nor tech­ni­cal resources are spared for this. In addi­tion, it should be laid on the streets, includ­ing with an open pull, but — again — with the cor­rect con­nec­tion to the “ground”. For home or gen­er­al office use, such an Eth­er­net inter­face would be redun­dant if prop­er­ly con­nect­ed, and even harm­ful if not prop­er­ly con­nect­ed.

For home and office, it is bet­ter to choose reg­u­lar UTP. It is cheap­er and eas­i­er to install, and is suf­fi­cient­ly pro­tect­ed from harm­ful exter­nal elec­tro­mag­net­ic fields. Of course, it is bet­ter not to stretch it near the refrig­er­a­tor or microwave, but in gen­er­al, the sig­nal trans­mis­sion qual­i­ty is at a suf­fi­cient lev­el.