CCA Cable: The Customer Isn't Paying You Twice

We talk through how counterfeit cabling really shows up on jobs and why it can turn into failed inspections, broken trust, and expensive rework. With cable engineer Matt Schumacher, we draw a clean line between legitimate UL or ETL listings and too-good-to-be-true cable like copper clad aluminum that never should have been in the box. 

• what “counterfeit cable” means in the real world and why it becomes a contract problem fast 
• what “listed” means for communications cable and how UL 444 fits into the picture 
• how to verify a UL or ETL listing number and why reputable manufacturers matter 
• what CCA copper clad aluminum is and why ANSI/TIA 568.2-E does not allow it 
• how oxidation and material loss can create intermittent failures and repeat service calls 
• why PoE can look fine on day one then fail later as resistance climbs 
• how to explain the risk to customers, designers, and consultants without getting lost in jargon 
• why high frequency data cable is not “just cable” and how rough pulls and kinks can hurt performance 
• what CPR means in Europe and why LSZH does not replace CMP or CMR in the US 
• where the industry may be headed with single mode fiber, PoE growth, and new power concepts 

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Transcript

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Welcome And How To Support

SPEAKER_04 0:00

Hey Wild Monkeys, welcome to another episode of Let's Talk Cabling. This week we're talking about counterfeit cabling.

SPEAKER_06 0:11

Let's talk cabling. Yeah, let's talk cabling. Stay connected! Stay connected! Do it right.

SPEAKER_04 0:33

Welcome to the show where we tackle the tough questions submitted by apprentices, installers, technicians, project foreman, project managers, estimators, IT personnel, even customers. We are connecting at the human level so that we can connect the world. If you're watching this show on YouTube, would you mind hitting the subscribe button and the bell button to be notified when new content is being produced? If you are listening to us on one of the audio podcast platforms, would you mind leaving us a five-star rating? Those simple little steps help us take on the algorithm so we can educate, encourage, and rich the lives of people in the ICT industry. Wednesday night, 6 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, what are you doing? You know I do a live stream on TikTok, Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook, and a bunch of other places where you get to ask your favorite RCDD. And you know that's me. Your favorite RCDD questions on installation design, certification, credentialing. I even do career path questions. But I can hear you now. But check out drive my truck, ride my wedding, get up with it. Relax. Breathe in. Breathe out. I record them and you can watch them at your convenience. And finally, while this show is free and will always remain free. If you find value in this content, when you click on that QR code right there, you can buy me a cup of coffee. You could even schedule a 15-minute one-on-one call with me after hours, of course. So as I mentioned in the intro, counterfeit cabling.

Counterfeit Cable And Listing Scams

SPEAKER_04 2:03

Well, you're not going to get arrested by the what police department? What law enforcement agency? The Secret Service. You're not going to get arrested by the Secret Service because you're installing counterfeit cabling, but you could run into some pretty bad contract issues, issues with the AHJ, and a bunch of other stuff as well. And the problem is I see a lot of people using CCA. I got this from Amazon. Yeah, that's CCA cable. So you know me. I know a lot of smart people. So I reached out to a cable engineer. Cable engineer. I like that title. I want that title someday. Maybe. Oh, I don't know. Matt Schumacher. And he is going to come on tonight and he's going to talk to us about CCA cable. And if we have time, we're even going to touch base on CPR. So there we go. Matt, welcome to the show, my friend, for Take Two. Take two. How are you doing, my friend? Doing well. How are you? Doing fantastic. Why don't you go ahead and give the audience the 50,000 view of who you are and why should we listen to you?

SPEAKER_02 3:12

Alright. So, one, I'm human as far as I know. We'll get the hopefully someday I'll get that confirmed. And I've been in the industry for 18 years. I've held various different titles, first with Burke Tech and then once we were bought under Levitton. So I basically, if it's somehow related to networks, I've probably at least had some interface with it at one point in my life or another.

SPEAKER_04 3:53

So see, you are a cable engineer. I saw you looking around, like who is he who's he talking about? I saw that when I said cable engineer. No, I've never had the title cable engineer. I'm officially giving you the title cable engineer.

SPEAKER_02 4:08

My my current title is Systems Engineer Supervisor, so I like cable engineers. I got all the components.

SPEAKER_05 4:18

Yes.

SPEAKER_04 4:18

No, cable engineer is better because that just sounds cool.

SPEAKER_02 4:22

Fair enough. Fair enough.

SPEAKER_04 4:24

So so you obviously know a lot about cabling and testing because you and I work together on a few different projects. And one of the things I've come to appreciate about you is your attention to detail. That's the the engineer in you. You dot your eyes, cross your knees. I I will be honest here, sometimes it drives me crazy. Because I I shoot from the hip, right? I shoot from the hip. And then and then you bring me back to reality. So I appreciate those conversations you and I have.

SPEAKER_02 4:50

So first of all, I was gonna say it it drives plenty of people crazy when uh they ask me a yes-no question, and I don't give them a yes-no answer until after I've done the explanation.

SPEAKER_04 4:58

Well, that's that's the engineering. That's the engineering you, right?

SPEAKER_02 5:02

Oh yeah.

SPEAKER_04 5:03

Yeah. So when you hear the term counterfeit cable, I think the first time I heard that was at a Bixie conference, oh, I don't know, two or three cycles ago, maybe even longer. Counterfeit cable, um, what does that actually mean to our industry?

UL And ETL Listing Demystified

SPEAKER_02 5:16

So it can mean a couple different things. Um, I know, gosh, when I first started in the industry, a lot of times it came up more as a counterfeit cable is a cable that does that claims to be listed, but actually isn't. So they would claim to be plenum rated, but if you were to actually put them into the Steiner tunnel, actually do the burn, they would fail and they would fail miserably. But the cable was cheap, so people would buy it, give install it, and then run the risk of you know having counter-confit cable.

SPEAKER_04 5:48

Before we get too much further along, you said listed. I can tell you what the textbook defin what the code book definition of listed actually means. But I won't because you deal with that a lot more than I do in a real life scenario basis. What does listed actually mean?

SPEAKER_02 6:03

So listed means that it will meet the requirements of the appropriate UL standard. So for example, for copper cable, that would be UL 444. Now a lot of people will go, wait, what about Plenum? What about riser? That's a component of UL 444. If you have a cable listed, so that means that you go to UL or ETL site, and should be noted, you can be ETL listed and still meet all the requirements. Um you go to that site, you'll find our cable under there, and that just means we've gone through all the mechanical tests, uh, things like tensile and elongation testing. Uh we've done all the measurements of the jacket thickness, the insulation thickness, the size of the copper conductor, what is in the copper conductor, the burns. So does it meet the riser, plenum, whatever we're you know, trying to get listed for? After all of that, they give an authorization to mark. And that just basically means we can put in the print legend and we can put on the label uh that you know coveted C UL US or C ETL US. Now again, I mentioned that ETL is perfectly valid. Uh a lot of times the confusion comes can come into hey, it says U UL 444, that means it has to be listed a UL, right? And I have to I have to allow customers know this all the time. UL has two different parts to it. It's got the standards part and it's got the test lab part. Teslab part, that's the part that handles listing. So the equivalent of ETL, just a different company. The standards part are the people who actually go through and write up the standards. ETL does not have an equivalent of that. So they're doing all their testing to UL 444 in the case of copper communication. So it's it's very easy to go, oh, it doesn't say UL on that print ledge and therefore it's not properly listed, and that is not correct. It is. So listing is very important, as as you know from just looking at the code book and such. If you don't have a listed cable, you are limited with how far you can bring it in. So you have to have it listed.

SPEAKER_04 8:16

So you said they gave you permission to mark or give us permission to mark, right? Um so that means somewhere on a on a on the package on the on the spool or on the on the on the box, there's there's the UL label, right?

SPEAKER_02 8:31

Um the ETL label.

SPEAKER_04 8:33

With the ETL label, correct. Is that is that just printed on, or is that a holographic sticker? What is that?

SPEAKER_02 8:40

Yes.

SPEAKER_04 8:42

So way to nail that one down.

SPEAKER_02 8:52

But regardless, they give us a basically a document that says you are allowed to do this on our behalf. We give you permission, and if you fail the listing, you can't do it anymore.

SPEAKER_04 9:01

So then let me ask you this then, because on those of those pictures I've seen of you know spools and boxes of CCA cable, they had the UL label on there too. So obviously that's a counterfeit label. Do you know of any way the technician out in the field can distinguish the between the real UL market and a fake one?

SPEAKER_02 9:23

So it depends on how well you have internet uh connection. So on UL and ETL site, there are free places where you can actually look up the identification number or look up the company and then get all the information from there. Um and it's very easy to look up, and if you can't find it on there, it does not exist. It's pretty much as simple as that. Um, however, like like anything, sometimes it's hard to detect counterfeit on the fly, and a lot of times it's even better to more know do you know the company that's actually on on there? Is it a reputable company? Now, I'm not gonna even try and claim that Leviton is the only reputable company, but there are several others. Um I know several in the US that I would also consider are competitors that would actually also consider a reputable company.

SPEAKER_04 10:18

That's a good point. That's a great point because if you can't if you can't pronounce the name of the manufacturer who you're buying from, that should be a red flag. I'm not saying that's gonna rule it out.

SPEAKER_02 10:28

Yeah, but no, no, no, I'm in that same boat because I I look at um I look at a lot of stuff on Amazon and I see 12 different products that all look identical, and all of them are almost words.

SPEAKER_00 10:40

Let's take a short break.

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SPEAKER_00 10:42

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CCA Copper Clad Aluminum Explained

SPEAKER_04 11:27

One of the biggest you know things that we really deal with is CCA cabling. You hear you hear the technicians fight over it all the time in the in the low voltage nation Facebook group and all the other social media sites. So what is what is CCA cable?

SPEAKER_02 11:41

So CCA can mean two things, and and and the one you allude to is the CPR, so I'll leave that for now till later. But CCA can also mean copper clad aluminum. What that means is basically you have a bit of aluminum and then you put copper over top of it. Pretty much as the it's exactly what's on the sticker. And it is not category rated. I can tell you that for a fact, because as I look over at my other monitor to anti-TIA 568.2-E section five point three, it explicitly says copper clad aluminum is not allowed.

SPEAKER_04 12:21

Hold on, hold on, let me let me look that up in my standards again. Hold what hold on. What did you say that was?

SPEAKER_02 12:27

That is uh in anti TIA 568.2-E 5.3. Horizontal cable, mechanical performance, copper clad aluminum is not allowed.

SPEAKER_04 12:39

But aluminum's conductive, so why is it a bad idea?

SPEAKER_02 12:43

Sure, so are a lot of other metals. Uh it doesn't necessarily mean that it's a resistant to oxidation. Aluminum is very good at oxidizing. When you add aluminum to copper, it's even better at oxidizing. And unlike copper, aluminum oxide is non-conductive and transparent, interesting enough. Um in a very non-interesting way. But uh yeah, and that is the the one dilemma, is it's just essentially it's gonna rust, it's gonna oxidize, it's gonna be an issue. And now your communication that seemed great the day you installed it may not be successful, may not have good communication, and then you're getting a service call asking why it's not working all of a sudden, even though you're like, hey, it was working when I left.

SPEAKER_04 13:34

Right, and and you know, there's probably there's gotta be some long-term reliability issues associated with CCA cabling, I would imagine.

SPEAKER_02 13:43

I I would be concerned with it as well, just from again, uh primarily that oxidation factor. So jacks, uh plugs, all that has always been designed around the TIA standard, which is expecting a fully copper conductor uh made of solid copper, not having any other uh metal involved into it. So if you start adding in aluminum, well now if you get oxidation, that may cause those conductors it's connected to to oxidize. Oxidation will cause basically material loss, will cause communication loss. Now all of a sudden your jack also has to be replaced because it's no good. You could repunch down and it may not be able to hold the conductors correctly, it may not be able to work correctly, and it might otherwise just fail.

SPEAKER_04 14:33

So you mentioned the ANSI uh verbiage, which I was trying to get out of my book and look it up real quick. I I really need to get a soft copy of the standards, but I don't have another $1,200 to spend on another set of standards. But uh there you go. Unless you volunteer. Well, actually, technically, if you volunteer, you still got to pay twelve hundred dollars, but you get a free set of standards. But uh neither here nor there. So you mentioned where it was in the ANSI standards. Is there anything to your knowledge in the UL listing requirements that would be?

SPEAKER_02 15:04

Well, UL 444 would not allow you to do anything other than copper as well. That one I don't have open in front of me, so I can't give you the exact citation uh like I could just a moment ago. But no, UL 444 would not allow you to do it from a listing standard either. That's expecting you know copper, um straight up copper, not copper collied aluminum. So it then gets into it's it's just fundamentally, it's not a category cable. It's not as easy as that.

SPEAKER_04 15:31

Yeah, it's not. I agree 100%. And uh again, that's the battle I will I will you know stand on for as until the end of time.

SPEAKER_02 15:40

Uh to me it's easy because I can literally quote copperclad aluminum is not allowed.

SPEAKER_04 15:45

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. That makes it a lot easier. I believe so the technician out in the field who may not necessarily knew before the show, CCA, copper clad aluminum, what are some real world consequences of CCA cabling that they may come across?

SPEAKER_02 16:02

So, aside

Liability AHJ Trouble And PoE Risks

SPEAKER_02 16:03

from the what we already mentioned about the you know data loss side of things, is just that again, you might get a customer call. You might get an issue with the customer going, hey, I just discovered this cable's not a category cable because I listened to this podcast by a really knowledgeable dude uh and Matt 2, and managed to um you know find out that this isn't a category cable. I paid for a category cable. Well, now you've got to replace it. Guess who's on the hook for that? The person who ordered that cable and said, No, no, no, no, it's fine. Well, now you're paying twice. You're paying for the labor to reinstall and all, and you're paying for the cable to replace it. So that really super cheap cable suddenly isn't anymore. You might get an AHJ who is knowledgeable about this and may then go, hey, that's not allowed. Rip it out, replace it now, or you're not getting you know the go-head to continue forward. Well, if you do that, now again, you're doubling everything that you did, your project's late, your end user or your customer is now yelling at you, going, Why aren't you done yet? And you have to say, Well, because I decided to go with really cheap cable, and now I'm paying the consequence for that. And then you lose that business entirely in the end.

SPEAKER_04 17:18

Yeah, you skirt all around it, but um you've realistic realistically, what you're saying is liability. And I know why you do it, because you're not a lawyer and you didn't stay the holiday and select last night, so you can't pretend to be a lawyer, but liability. If you install CCA cabling, number one, as you mentioned, the AHJ's not gonna allow it. If they catch it, that's bad news. You know, if you enter a contract with a customer, and the contract stipulates the work will meet and or exceed the standards. Well, guess what? According to what you just read, that's not gonna meet or exceed the standards. So, you know, the funny thing is, is uh customers aren't gonna pay you uh twice to install a cable that you should install correctly the first time. So huge financial risk. And then then we also can you know can even wax poetic about the damage to maybe to your reputation to others in the industry, right? You know, we know everybody thinks this is a big, huge industry, but we're it this is a small industry, trust me.

SPEAKER_02 18:16

As I've mentioned before to some people, we are a niche industry. We really are. We may be an important industry, but important and niche don't have to be mutually exclusive. And the other thing is we are an industry where people talk to one another and they gossip to one another. So if you are known to cheap out, that'll get around.

SPEAKER_04 18:40

100%. 100%. So you already ruled out that uh CCA is not not uh an acceptable installation for category-rated high performance data cabling. That's not the only kind of cabling we install. Sometimes we do PoE. How would that affect the PoE cable installs?

SPEAKER_02 19:01

That's a great question. And I have to make I've never done the testing on copper clad aluminum to know. But knowing what I know, aluminum itself is a soft metal. Uh but that being said, uh if you're thinking like, oh, would it melt? The answer is probably not, just because not that much electricity is going through. So it's unlikely to melt. Aluminum has a fairly high melting point, um, as does copper. But when you're putting in you know, power down and all, you are then again kind of running into that problem of you got two different metals interacting with one another. So if we look at kind of our sister industry, the electricians and all, they at one point kind of looked at doing things with like copper, doing things with aluminum. And if you ever look at any of those receptacles, you will always see like, oh, this is allowed for copper only, this is allowed for aluminum only, this is allowed for both, or this is allowed for both, if you have the proper adaption to be able to go from co aluminum to copper. And again, the main reason for this is you're getting into that, it'll oxidize faster if you try to put like copper onto aluminum onto a copper connection and all that. And that just creates a lot of problems. And that's what you're gonna run into as you run in this. You might all of a sudden go from say having the PoE resistance you need, 25 ohms loop resistance for uh type four, say. So you have a hundred watt camera, you're powering it, it's working great day one, and then sometime later, all of a sudden, that camera cannot power on to save its life because that oxidation has increased its resistance. It is now more resistive than it was the day you put it in. Because again, aluminum oxidation is non-conductive. Now it's got to bridge that gap because I I know a lot of people talk about the skin effect. Uh, things travel on the skin, that's why copper cloud aluminum should be fine. DC doesn't. DC is not a skin effect, that's a high frequency thing, which is which is where data communication occurs at. But DC is gonna be going down that aluminum core. So you get that oxidation. Now it's got to bridge past that. Now it's got to essentially push past that oxidation that's occurring between the two layers. Now your resistance is increasing. Now you're gonna run into the possibility that your device just cannot power. Period. Camera goes down, people yell, you get a call saying, Why isn't it working? You installed your cable, you told me it was good, and then we get back into that liability thing again.

SPEAKER_04 21:37

And then you're going out to meet the customer, and the customer's screaming and yelling at you because you were supposed to be the professional, and now all of a sudden, you know, it's not working, and then when you shoot it and you test it, and you see that all these things are going wrong, then the obviously the quality of the cable becomes an issue. Then the customer's gonna ask you at some point why did you install inferior quality cabling? I guarantee. Most people who listen to my podcast don't want to be known as the installers or the companies that do minimum quality of work myself. Oh, I would hope not. So, but that's not the only people in my audience. I have I also have designers and consultants and project managers. How if if they got if they got a c you and I both know well, I don't I don't I don't have a lot of experience in estimating. So I I would always customer would always come to me and say, look, we want to put in this cable, and they would send me this cable, and let's just say it's CCA cable. Okay. As a consultant or designer, or maybe even an engineer, I'm not an engineer or estimator, how what's a good way to communicate to the customer that, hey, that's CCA cable, and here's why we should not use that.

SPEAKER_02 22:50

So basically, what I would I would almost go down all those the kind of the same things. It's the you wanted a category cable. Why would you want to use something that's not a category cable? You're giving me the antithesis. Um and I also go, so part of my job function, this is a slight tangent, but it'll make sense. Part of my job function is to give tours. And one of the tours that I go through and note is that a lot of customers love getting the latest equipment. I completely understand that impulse as I'm definitely one of them. But then they want to have the cheapest cable they can get. And that would almost be the same as I want the fancy Cadillac, but give me a four-cylinder inline 1.5, no turbo, no supercharger, no nothing, and then complaining that it's not operating the way you're expecting.

SPEAKER_03 23:40

I have a hard time merging onto the highway, I hit the gas, and then three years later I finally get up to speed.

SPEAKER_02 23:46

Exactly. And it's the same idea. And a lot of times once we go through our tour, so many customers realize that so much science goes into making these cables.

SPEAKER_05 23:56

Right.

SPEAKER_02 23:56

And I would say you go to any of our competitors and they're going to say the exact same thing. Cables not it's not a matter of going for the cheapest one. The cheapest one probably didn't take the time to do the right work, didn't take the time to do the right science, and didn't look into it to make sure that it would actually function the way it should. They are looking to just make a quick buck and like some of the companies, who knows if they'll be around in a year anyway. I suspect a lot of those companies exist long enough to basically sell it for the quick buck and then disappear again. I can't guarantee that. That is allegedly. Don't sue me.

SPEAKER_04 24:36

Don't worry, we're not going to sue you. We're talking hypothetically. Yeah, exactly. Hypothetically, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 24:41

Yes.

SPEAKER_04 24:42

You said the science behind the cable. You know, I I've talked to cable engineers enough, and I've, you know, both on cable manufacturing, connectivity manufacturing, certification testers, all that stuff. I understand there's a lot more involved that goes into cabling than a lot of people realize. But one

Why Data Cable Is Not Just Cable

SPEAKER_04 25:01

of the comments I hear quite often on social media and I don't take this as an offense. It's usually by electricians. It's just cable. It's just it doesn't matter if you pull too hard on it. It doesn't matter if you exceed better, it's just cable. Give us some high level why is why is it so much more than just cable?

SPEAKER_02 25:24

So electrical cable is you're that low frequency, doesn't really matter. You don't have crosstalk in AC, you don't have um POE, you don't have the high-level communication. You slap some electrical tape on, you fix the problem if the jacket breaks. That's not communication cable. Communication cable is high frequency, and yes, one megahertz is considered high frequency. It's actually everything's operating in the radio frequency. So think uh things like radar, things um and things in that realm. AC's not that. AC's just basically bare bones, practically the same as DC for for our at least communication purposes. So another so what that gets into is basically those defects you might put in by pulling really, really hard, pulling around a corner, kinking it too hard, and all that. You've actually changed how the pairs are operating within that core. And if you change them enough, they are not operating as designed or intended, and all of a sudden your that high frequency communication can't operate the way it's supposed to, and it just doesn't work then. Or it might work, or it might create some problems, or it creates so much allows more noise to come in from the background that all of a sudden it's uh everything digital is signaled to noise, so all of a sudden that noise level is higher. Now it can't distinguish the computers can't distinguish the signal. They're gonna drop more packets, you drop enough packets, uh, you could affect your cameras significantly because cameras uh we we like to think of them as capturing multiple frames, but in reality what they're doing is they're capturing one frame and capturing the difference from that frame to the next frame to the next frame, and then capturing a new what's known as a keyframe. Well, if you destroy that keyframe, you have destroyed you know six to ten frames after that. And depending on the speed of your camera, that could be the difference between catching a license plate and just seeing garbage. It depends on the recording rate and all that. Not everyone records at 30 second uh frames a second, some record, you know, at 10 frames a second or something. Or you know, one frame a second. So if you're doing one frame a second, you've lost six seconds of footage. And if you're going on a high-speed car, that's enough to not know anything.

SPEAKER_04 27:49

Or a flock camera trying to take a picture of a car zipping on by. Yeah. So so you helped eliminate, at least somewhat eliminate, that myth, but you probably reinforced another myth. Oh, that's sissy cable. You gotta be careful how you treat it. And the answer to that is yes. Yes, you do.

SPEAKER_02 28:10

Yeah, you you really do, because again, it's it's not it's not your electrical cable. It's it's actually something that's carrying essentially the equivalent of radio waves. You're carrying that thing that you know, you you think like uh, you know, 93.3 megahertz. Uh sorry, I grew up near Philadelphia, so that's one of the radio stations I grew up uh listening to. And communication cable occurs, you know, can occur between, say, 10G is between 1 and 400 megahertz. What do you know? That radio frequency is right there. Yep. And we always think of that as oh, that's hot, you know, high level of radio waves. Well, yes. Hence you gotta respect the cable because you're carrying basically what you would listen to for for music.

SPEAKER_04 28:58

Absolutely. Let's

CPR LSZH And Spec Confusion

SPEAKER_04 28:59

shift our conversation to uh CPR cabling. CPR, I think of cardiopulmonary resuscitation, but I'm pretty sure that's not what it means. So uh what is CPR cabling?

SPEAKER_02 29:12

Uh so CPR, which I had to look up because I never actually remember. Uh thank you for telling me pulmonary pulmonary respiration. That's exactly what I didn't want. CPR is basically the, let me look at my monitor again, the construction products regulation in Europe. Basically, what it is is so we have here in the US, we have things like um your building materials, that's one code, your electrical requirements, that's another code, that's another set of things. You have your communication cables. CPR is kind of the equivalent of that in Europe. So you would have like uh components that would be drywall would have to fit into the CPR, uh, cabling, depending on the cable types and all. And it governs uh essentially what type of test requirements and all that. The reason they set this up was they were finding that like every country had its own requirements, and then it would turn into okay, I go from Germany to France. What can I use? I have no idea because I now have to figure out if I meet all these other new requirements. So the European Union just said, okay, this is dumb. Let's just simplify it. Everyone gets these definitions. Each country gets to define what gets used where. But if someone says uh for cabling, like, oh, it meets CCA, I know no matter what country I go to, that cable meets the same requirement. I don't have to play that guessing game of will it work, will it not? The only thing I have to know is basically, is it allowed or is it not? And that's a far simpler question to answer than having to worry about meeting every possible regulation. To be fair, the US actually has kind of the original problem that the European Union has. If we look at the NEC, you look at every state and who knows what it's gonna be. Uh like Pennsylvania is currently 2020. We're typically about two code cycles behind.

SPEAKER_04 31:08

You know, there are some states that don't operate out of the 2008 code book.

SPEAKER_02 31:14

I have not looked recently.

SPEAKER_04 31:16

There's four of them still operating on the 2008 code book. And we're in year 2026 as the time of this recording. So and you know, it kind of makes sense what you were just saying because, you know, um the a lot of Americans don't ever get outside the US and they don't really appreciate for how big the US is. But when you go over to Europe, you know, you got a lot of countries in a really small footprint, so they just kind of it kind of helps standardize everything like you were saying, amongst all the countries. So makes it easier for everybody.

SPEAKER_02 31:45

Oh, it really, really does. It really does simplify stuff. So when you look at that, one of those options are the CCA cable, which is basically level C so the they use alpha the alphabet for the levels A through F. Uh, although no cables have A, and there's actually two levels of B. Hey, I didn't make the standard up. And then the C A part of it is just telling you it's a cable. Um, I honestly don't know what any of the other designations are. I'm not from Europe, never was. Uh, and thus I just don't really personally worry about it. But I do care about CCA because I work with people in our Scotland plant. So I kind of do have to know about these things to be able to understand it. So we we have cables, uh, so I again it although the level B is split into two, B1's really never used for cabling either. So it's really B2 through F, and F is essentially the equivalent of unlisted. Now, I uh as in the US, how like you can use plenum and to substitute for riser, you can use a higher level letter to substitute for a lower. So if you put in B2 CIA cabling, you can put that wherever they it's required, and no one's gonna bat an eye at that. That's the one that's most stringent. But the other thing to note is it is low smoke zero how or low smoke halogen-free. Uh, I've heard both terms. So that basically means that when you burn it, it's not producing a lot of smoke. By the way, plenum is also low smoke uh by definition. Uh, but it's also made of no halogens. So it's made of materials that are halogen-free. That's typically not the case in the US. In fact, actually, uh as of the moment of this recording, while there does exist plenum rated low smoke zero uh plastics, they're so unbelievably expensive that no one would buy the product. We would not be able to sell a cable that was plenum rated and low smoke zero how. Now, one other thing I will note is that plenum is not low smoke zero how. And I have had people go, well, wait, isn't low smoke zero how like a super plenum? And the answer is no. No, low from the NEC perspective, low smoke zero how is a nice thing you can put on your jacket if you have it, and that's where that ends. It means nothing for purposes of US code. Uh if you say it's low smoke zero, but you don't have that CM, CMR, CMP marking, or even CMX or CMX outdoor, you might as well have an you not might as well you have an unlisted cable. I don't care how well it performed for the European market, you are for purposes of the US unlisted. So why do why why should we even care about CCA here in the US?

SPEAKER_04 34:33

That was my next question. If I kind of guessed since it's a Europe-based thing, should estimators, designers, installers in North America pay attention to it or just say, yeah, whatever.

SPEAKER_02 34:47

Uh the answer is slightly care if you see it, but for uh not not too much further than that. So should you care about CPR in general in the US? No. It doesn't affect your life at all. The reason why it should be brought up and you should at least slightly have like alarm bells going off if you read it, is because quite frankly, we have a global world. Uh we're not as isolated as we used to be. And that means that people from yeah, say Germany, you know, say they want to make a car and they make a plant and they go, hey, in Germany we use CCA cable in this plant, so we want to use CCA cable in the plant we're building in the US. That's where the alarm bell should go off. And this is also why I brought up the plenum thing. Because I've seen it where cable specs have said it's gotta be low smokes airhouse, it's got to meet you know, B2CA, it's gotta meet plenum. And then I go and I go, one of these things cannot uh it literally negates the other two. You can get one, you can get the other, but you can't get both. Now, riser, you can see there's definitely plenty of uh examples of riser, there's low smoke's air how. Um, so that that is a possible thing. That that that's kind of a non-issue there. But that's about as good as low smoke zero will ever get. You're never gonna see it as a plenum. So, because of that, you it's just a when you see it, just make sure it's got the appropriate actual appropriate rating. And even then, I would question do you really need low smoke zero? Because that could actually limit your cable options and make things actually more difficult for yourself for getting cables.

SPEAKER_05 36:29

Right.

SPEAKER_04 36:30

So let me ask you this question.

Future Of Fiber Copper And Power

SPEAKER_04 36:31

I want you to put on your uh go get your get your magic globe where you can predict the future. And I understand we're making a prediction here, so so I know that I got my tumbler of prediction. Here we go. Here's here's my magic ball. It's a good thing my dog's not in the room right now because she's been trying to attack me to get it. Um where do you th where do you foresee high performance requirements going in for future cable designs for as far as you know, flame, flame and smoke characteristics and performance?

SPEAKER_02 37:05

Alright, so let's start with five fiber's easy. I see that going single mode. Uh and that's just because most of the higher data rates, especially when you start getting into things like terabit, uh, are just gonna be single mode. It's as simple as that. So single mode's not gonna go away. That's pretty easy. For copper, at the moment, and I reserve the right to be wrong as we are doing predictions, I don't see it going past 10G, honestly. I I I definitely don't see it going away either. Uh, with basically added security cameras, wireless access points, um, reader devices, uh, the more technology basically gets involved, the more POE becomes an advantage. The fact that the RJ45, it doesn't matter where you are in the world, the RJ45 is the exact same. It's a universal plug. You don't need an adapter or like a travel adapter like you would anywhere else in the world. That has advantages. I actually see, and as things require less and less power, I actually foresee power over Ethernet becoming more and more common. You know, I could see TVs. Oh, I need Ethernet to that because that's my power.

SPEAKER_04 38:19

Yeah, you need the AC outlet. Are you venturing into the world of fault managed power systems? Is that what you're doing?

SPEAKER_02 38:27

You know what's funny is someone actually asked me about that even today. So right now, I would say fault managed power systems, and this is my personal opinion, does not as a representative of Leviton, not as a representative of anyone, definitely not a representative of this podcast.

SPEAKER_04 38:41

Well, all of them disclaimers.

SPEAKER_02 38:43

All of them disclaimers. I'm so used to that. It's neat, it's fun, it's fancy, it's nothing. At the m at this moment. My personal hope is that it would become the replacement of standard AC in the house. That's your hope? It's safe. Yes, because it's safe. It's the safety side. Why you know, you don't need an arc fault receptacle, you don't need a GFCI because this is it. But there's real problems you have to solve. I don't want to have to worry about going, well, if I buy from this customer or from this vendor, I'm now stuck to their proprietary plug for fault managed. No, I want to have the same thing like you uh in outlet. I want to be able to plug it in. I don't want to run the problem of going, well, I got a standard AC thing. How do I run this? Oh, I got to get an adapter. Well, now I gotta get that proprietary adapter. Well, now that's a problem.

SPEAKER_04 39:35

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. That makes a lot of sense because there's actually a uh and I can't I'm gonna butcher this name. But so I, you know, I I I do a lot of you know volunteer work with the PUE Consortium. But there's also one of those type of things for fault managed power systems. I don't know if it's called the fault managed power consortium or they got a different name for it. Um Luke Ghetto is involved with that, so is Ronda Davis, and they they're doing a lot of that fault managed power stuff as it is now. And you know it's kind of weird that I heard you say that because with your background in electrical and your dad being a electrician, I really thought you were gonna bash fault managed power systems because that's the thing is you know, is it gonna take away work of the electricians?

SPEAKER_02 40:20

No, I don't think it necessarily would because you the you I I would actually see the electrician becoming the ones to install all that systems. You still need a subpanel, you still need your uh you know your AC transmission, that's not gonna go away. That's actually still the most effective way to do it. You're converting it to house, so now you need that electrician to handle that. I don't know if it would be the best for say industrial equipment, so a lot of your industrial sector is probably not going to change. Right. So no, I don't think it would put electricians out of the house. I think it's just it becomes a different product electricians can offer. That's how I would look at it.

SPEAKER_04 40:55

So let me another question just to throw out you just kind of see what your initial thoughts are. Because actually, I think you don't you're really more copper than you are fiber, right?

SPEAKER_02 41:04

Yes, and no, I actually do our la our lab is both, so I've actually worked with both.

SPEAKER_04 41:09

So, what are your initial you know high-level thoughts on holocore fiber, multi-core fiber, and power over fiber?

SPEAKER_02 41:20

Okay, again, interesting that we talked uh multicore fiber because I was talking to someone about that today as well. My issue with multi-core. That would explain a lot. So the multicore fiber, my issue with that is basically how do you, when you do the connectorization, how do you orientate it so that you're actually using each core?

SPEAKER_05 41:46

Right.

SPEAKER_02 41:46

And at the moment, there's just the technology is not there to take advantage of it. From a concept, it's it's cool, it's a really neat idea. From a usage standpoint, we're not there. Now, power over fiber at the mid, I have not heard anything about this, but that would require some sort of conductive mechanism. I'm not necessarily against it.

SPEAKER_04 42:06

Super niche, super, super niche. I'm only aware of one manufacturer right now doing anything with it. And what they're basically doing, it there it hasn't it's it's all dielectric, there's no copper in it. And this is the same.

SPEAKER_02 42:18

I'm assuming they're using power basically through the lasers.

SPEAKER_04 42:21

Well, so what they're using basically, you know, kind of like solar panel kind of capture the light to convert it to electricity. And obviously, there's not a lot of electricity. We're not talking like, you know, there's no way we're talking, you know, maybe 15 watts, 20 watts, maybe 30 watts.

SPEAKER_02 42:38

So it's very I'd be impressed if it even got that high, honestly.

SPEAKER_04 42:41

Yeah, me too. I actually reached out to them to see if they'd come on the show to talk about that because uh that's one of the you know in my industry, especially in the social media world that I that I deal with a lot. You know, there's there's two two sets of people. Somebody will come on, they'll ask a question Hey, I'm putting in uh I'm putting in a some cabling for a camera out in the parking lot, and and uh so what kind of cable should I use? And and of course people jump on there and say, well, you know, cat five e cat six, whatever. There's always one person, I just use fiber.

SPEAKER_02 43:10

Okay, so sorry, I would have actually said make sure you use outside braided cable because don't use that indoor rated stuff, it's not designed for that. That's my first reaction when I would hear someone saying that.

SPEAKER_04 43:22

Who can kick out of this?

Field Story And Final Takeaways

SPEAKER_04 43:23

So yeah, we went camping a couple months back, and uh so we're Floridians, so we are geared to find the place with the most shade. Okay, that's the type of fair. That's a that's the prime parking spot, the place with the most shade. So we found this camping site beautifully covered with trees, nice and shady. Well, the way that we connect to the internet is Starlink. Starlink sometimes doesn't work through well too well through canopy of trees.

SPEAKER_01 43:53

But weird how that works. I know, right? It doesn't have a source of the signal and it can't detect it. Weird.

SPEAKER_04 43:59

But here's the thing, here's the thing, right? It uh the Starlink, when you buy the Starlink dish, they give you like a 75-foot cable, which is pretty good long cable, but our the campsite we were in, 75 feet wouldn't even get us out from underneath the trees.

SPEAKER_02 44:12

I was gonna say 75 feet always sounds long until you need to use it.

SPEAKER_04 44:16

Right, exactly. So what did I do? Chuck the cable guy. So why couldn't this happen at home where I've got three spools of you know Cat 6A sitting up in my podcast studio? No, this had to be on the road. I had to go to Home Depot and buy a box of Cat 6 cable, and I literally ran a hundred, I measured out 130 feet, and I bought a couple cheap, you know, Cat 6 jacks, terminated it, plugged it in, win a win.

SPEAKER_02 44:41

Alright, so then this was for a couple days, right?

SPEAKER_04 44:44

It was a couple days and it was it was not outside rated cable, I will tell you that.

SPEAKER_02 44:48

I will concede indoor rated cable will work for a couple days outdoors.

SPEAKER_04 44:53

Right. As long as it doesn't rain.

SPEAKER_02 44:54

As long as yeah, and as long as it's not getting too badly destroyed by the UV. I mean, that does take a little bit of time. Yeah, yeah. Long term, don't do it.

SPEAKER_04 45:03

I wouldn't recommend. So if I decide to kind of make a longer backup cable for the future for the next canopy, tree canopy campsite, it will be outside plant-rated cable.

SPEAKER_02 45:14

I was gonna say, I can give you plenty of suggestions. I I will preserve that for the future, though.

SPEAKER_04 45:19

Yeah, yeah. Well, you know, I could always use some of that paradigm cable and and run a thing out to like, what is it, 200 meters or something like that?

SPEAKER_02 45:26

It is 200 meters.

SPEAKER_04 45:27

That's that's actually state.

SPEAKER_02 45:29

It is stadium. The paradigm is the solution.

SPEAKER_04 45:31

Yeah, there you go. There you go. There you go. Brother Matt, as I I appreciate you coming on and waxing poetic about CPR cabling and copper clad aluminum and uh and the future of our industry. I appreciate you coming on, my friend.

SPEAKER_02 45:44

Well, thank you very much for having me. I appreciate it.

SPEAKER_06 46:09

Let's talk cable. Let's talk cable.