Compared old flat Cat5 runs to new shielded stuff, night and day in a warehouse

Rowan Hunt · 2026-08-15T12:45:05.053554+00:00

We rewired a 40,000 sq ft distribution center outside Columbus last month and I finally saw the difference side by side. The old horizontal runs were plain Cat5e from like 2008, nothing shielded, running right next to the motor control cabling. Our new drops are Cat6a F/UTP with proper grounding at both ends. Same switches, same patch panels, but throughput errors dropped from maybe 2% down to basically zero on the long 300 foot runs. I used to think shielding was just marketing fluff for most installs, but in that industrial noise environment it flat out wins. Anyone else had a job where the old cabling was the bottleneck and a re-run fixed things you never even blamed on it?

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Compared old flat Cat5 runs to new shielded stuff, night and day in a warehouse | Commercial Networking - HW Forums