Why Twisted Cable Get the Twists inside it?
Many of you in the Ethernet industry have seen the inside of an Ethernet cable. There are twists inside the cable. If you are pondering over (this) question that why the twists then you have come to the right place. We are going to answer this question (twisted cable) in detail here in this blog. Not only that, we’ll discuss the benefits of having a twisted structure inside the cable.
Let’s unravel this mystery.
Internal Structure of an Ethernet Twisted Cable
A typical Ethernet cable has usually four twisted pairs of wires. These pairs are blue, orange, brown, and green. The solid blue pair has a blue and a white stripe, the green pair has a green and white stripe, and so on. There is a total of eight conductors inside a cable. The wire has a thickness of 23AWG.
The main tenacity of this structure is to reduce crosstalk. This is a phenomenon that happens when two wires talk to each other inside the cable. Don’t worry these wires do not talk in the literal sense. It means that their signals overlap each other. This can compromise the data integrity of the signals. To address this issue, the cable comes with its shielding. Now you might be thinking that an unshielded cable does not have this shield inside it and a shielded one has a shield. Well, this statement is somewhat true.
The shielded Ethernet cable does have an extra layer of protection but it cannot function without the basic shield that comes built-in with a cable. The external foil prevents electromagnetic interference and crosstalk. To get a clear picture, imagine you are meditating with soothing music. And a band is playing hard rock music next door with a thousand fans screaming. You cannot hear them while you are inside a protective bubble. This is how a shielded cable works.
Hold on, that is not all!
About our previous illustration, your meditation music is a bit loud and you can hear the rock music at the same time. This would create a mess and you could not hear a single thing in that mess. This is what happens when wires talk to each other inside a cable.
Each wire has its electromagnetic field. If you have a Gigabit Ethernet connection, each conductor would have its electromagnetic field. All of these conductors pass electrons back and forth. The overlapping of signals is bound to happen with all this mess.
This is where the twisted structure comes into play. The twists converse the polarization of wires at every twist. As a result, there is a balanced electromagnetic field inside every Ethernet cable. That is why these cables are also known as balanced twisted pairs. This whole process makes the conductors quiet so that they can hear each other in harmony and make sense of the entire conversation.
Different Twists per Inch
A keen observer would notice that there are different twists per inch. This means that some cables have more twists per inch than others. Now, this is not a manufacturing flaw but a clever scheme to reduce crosstalk and interference. If a pair is working in perfect harmony at a certain twist rate, it would be vulnerable to interfering with another pair. The solution for that is to vary the twist rate per inch to reduce crosstalk and electromagnetic interference.
Color Scheme of Pairs
Why do pairs have different colors? That is a great question to ask. The answer is simple. The manufacturer makes conductors of different colors for us humans. This helps us to differentiate the different pairs. The electrons do not care about the color at all. But it would help us to differentiate various pairs and how to connect them while creating a connection.
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