CCA Cable.......again

When we were contacted by a company to carry out some consultancy and some bespoke training on site, we said OK……….it will be a workshop style non accredited day course…..they said no problem………..
Apparently the company had encountered some issues at a recent contract/installation and could we possibly attend a meeting……we didn’t give it a second thought!!!!!
So here is the back story……….
The Midlands based contractor, was informed by a customer that they had purchased some very low cost twisted-pair category rated cable that was provided by the customer for a modest sized installation. So far so good you might think!! Think again………the installation company’s site engineer wasn’t immediately suspicious, as it assumed that the cable had been supplied from a reputable industry distributor. That soon changed when it came time to install the cable.
The site engineer explained to me “Our guys promptly arrived on site to start the preparatory work; things like marking out the outlet positions; looking at the assured pathway and ensuring that redundant cabling was removed as necessary etc”……. “One of the guys took a look at the boxes of customer supplied cable. He noticed that it was not an immediately recognised brand. Given that the customer was asking for a warranty certificate”, we took a closer look at these boxes of Cat6 cable”.
Upon closer scrutiny the brand was unknown. There were UL numbers and a NVP value printed on the side of the box. Apart from that, there were no other clues. After a bit more research and discussion with the customer, it suddenly became apparent that the cable was a CCA cable - constructed with copper clad aluminium conductors.
Informing the customer that the cable they were supplying was not a category rated/ISO class cable, was tricky!!” Our contractor would not be able to issue a warranty. At first the customer was not convinced, and took the view that the apparently authentic UL mark meant that the cable was indeed category rated cable.
Our advice
It wasn’t until we were brought in to the discussion that we were able to prove that the cable was in fact, a Chinese cable bought from a national electrical wholesaler. I dug out several recent articles about copper clad aluminium cable from the CCCA in the US, and another online article from a different source suggesting that the brand in question was under investigation for UL fraud in the USA. I presented this information to the customer, and once it reached director level in the company, the customer rightly decided not to use the cable they had purchased.
The customer had bought the non-compliant cable, they couldn’t use it and they can’t sell it. They ultimately have lost £15,000. Thankfully, the contractor backed up by us, installed specified cable/modules/panels etc., from a reputable manufacturer.
All’s well the ends well as the warranty is now in place,”
My advice is this: get properly trained - do not accept any CCA or CCC cable substitutes – be aware that this cable will not be able to pass a category/ISO transmission characteristic test and is also likely to be non-fire rated.

Total Comms Training

SKILLS EMERGENCY!!

You can tell its the Summer when the news media start to trawl for news....this one caught my eye the other day......

The title/heading was like a developing "breaking" news story...."Skills Emergency" it cried out....the story takes on a tone of even greater urgency, using language like "....warning that a skills shortage is "threatening to starve economic growth" you can check it out by clicking here

In truth, this report was simply recounting the results of a survey carried out the CBI and Pearsons, who have just sold off the FT and The Economist.

There is no doubt that the CBI have reached a conclusion here that I would say most of already knew... there is and always has been a skills shortage so nothing startling here is there?

Well maybe there is. It's worth remembering that whenever a developed industrial country is growing or emerges from the kind of recession that the UK has experienced since 2008, there will always be skills shortages.........

Because we simply don't take a longer view, the amount of investment in training in a recession inevitably takes a back seat.......

Connector cleaning.....again

As some of you may know, this is a bit of a pet subject for me and that is connector contamination……

A fibre optic link, whether it be in a backbone or a datacentre is pretty unobtrusive. You could even say, it is a little bit boring.

But there is one thing that every fibre optic link has in common. And furthermore, we all need to take a just a little bit more seriously: I refer to, of course, to keeping the end faces of connectors clean.

The cleaning of connector end faces is still to this day, a question of inspection and asking yourself the question “is it clean”. This process is made all the more arduous because so often, we inherit someone else’s network, and believe me, some of the networks are not a pretty sight!

One thing that slightly puzzles me though, and that is despite the fact that there is more and more fibre is being installed, that end face cleaning is not as widespread as it should be…

It’s a false economy to think that by “skipping” this process that somehow, it will save time and money. The reverse is the case….it will be far more costly both in terms of additional time spent on site after the installation has taken place, let alone loosing valuable business to the competition.

For more information on our training courses, go to www.totalcommstraining.com