These days electronics professionals aren't that much different than Lightning McQueen and his quest for “speed.”
Rather than looking for the fastest lap times like Disney's fictional character, professional installers are looking for connectivity speed regardless of whether it's for high-performance 4K images or its network speeds for activities such as streaming media.
Taking a new approach to a proven format, the Fla.-based cabling manufacturer Wireworld, has announced its new Starlight Category 8 cables for high-speed network applications.
Wireworld president and founder David Salz says the company developed the new Starlight Category 8 cables to meet the public's increasing appetite for network speed without making the cables challenging to install.
“As network speeds have increased, the cables that can keep up have become stiffer and more difficult to install,” explains Salz. “We developed the Starlight Category 8 Ethernet cable to overcome limitations of previous network cable designs. This design replaces the conventional twisted conductors with triple-shielded parallel conductors to improve the most critical parameters of digital signal transmission. In addition to improving performance, the flat structure is extremely flexible and thin enough to hide under a carpet.”
The company points out the new Cat-8 cable is its first product to employ its Tite-Shield Technology, which Wireworld describes as a design that replaces traditional twisted-pair conductors with triple-shielded parallel conductors to improve digital signal transmission.
Wireworld also notes the design facilitates the cable's flat, flexible construction.
Wireworld explains that when looking at the evolution of category cabling, Cat-7 was created to meet the demands of 10Gbe networking applications.
Looking ahead with the ongoing development of Cat-8, the format's proposed standards will support 40Gbe data rates to help ensure the reliability of streaming content, while providing some measure of future proofing.
To develop the Starlight Category 8 cable, the Florida company says the primary challenge to meeting the bandwidth criteria was to minimize crosstalk between twisted-pair channels.
Wireworld's Tite-Shield design arranges four parallel channels with a dense three-layer shield on each conductor pair. This design isolates the channels without having to twist the channels, and it ensures the channels are the same length, which eliminates timing issues.
