Brand-Rex’s high performance Augmented Category 6 (10GPlus) Zone Cable has now been fully certified by 3P Third Party Testing, the independent testing laboratory.

3P’s certification confirms the Zone Cable’s status as one of the highest performing cables currently available, making it ideally suited for the most demanding applications, especially 10GBASE-T.

Based in Copenhagen, Denmark, 3P is one of the most respected testing laboratories serving the international cabling and electronics industries. It has been working with the performance of data cabling since the 1980s, and carries out certification testing on all elements of communication systems, from cables and connecting hardware to patch cords, permanent links and channels.

“3P has tested our cable in accordance with the Category 6A performance requirements of the IEC 61156-6 cable standard,” said Iain Ballingall, Brand-Rex’s Technical Director. “Its tests have confirmed all the specifications of the cable, in particular its excellent skew, crosstalk and EMC performances.

“This proves that the cable’s screening performance ensures the alien crosstalk values of any system employing this product will be >>10dB better than the specification requirements, assuming terminations are done correctly. And that not only means it will support 10GBASE-T but that the installer will not have to check the Alien crosstalk of the cabling system to prove system compliance. We do not know of any one else supplying this level of product with an equivalent level of certified approval.”

The cable’s construction also ensures it easily passes other performance requirements stipulated in the relevant standards (e.g. NEXT, PSNEXT, ELFEXT etc…) and provides headroom in the critical characteristics.

The 10GPlus Zone Cable is designed to provide high bandwidth performance for use in horizontal wiring in structured cabling installations, in data centres and storage area networks (SANs), and in shorter length backbones.

Suitable for use in the most challenging Data Centre environments, it is smaller and 30% lighter than conventional cables, and makes possible a 100% increase in the number of cables per cable tray. The 10GPlus Zone Cable is also more flexible and easier to install, and is suitable for channel lengths up to 70m.

The Zone Cable is one element in Brand-Rex’s 10GPLUS Cabling System, in which performance is guaranteed to meet ClassEA Channel limits, when 10GPLUS cables are used as part of the 10GPLUS installation.

Low Smoke and fume Zero Halogen (LSOH) cable jacket material is fitted as standard, and the Brand-Rex warranty is available when it forms part of a 10GPLUS installation.

As well as supporting 10GBASE-T the Zone Cable provides the perfect foundation for building high performance, reliable LANs for transmission of Class A, B, C, D, E and EA applications as currently defined in ISO 11801 and EN 50173, including voice, broadband video and Power Over Ethernet.