Cat5e FTP Shielded Cord, Foiled RJ45 Patch Lead

Overview

A cat5e ftp shielded cord adds one thing to the standard unshielded construction: an overall polyester-aluminum foil screen at 100 percent coverage, carried into screened RJ45 plugs at both ends. That is the right choice when a run passes motor drives, fluorescent lighting, elevator machinery or a densely packed cable tray, and it is the wrong choice when it does not, because the screen costs money, adds stiffness, and creates a grounding obligation that has to be met for it to do anything. The jacket is a flame retardant PVC compound, the pairs are 24 AWG solid bare copper under HDPE insulation, and the channel holds 100 ohm impedance.

Key Specifications

Cable Category	Cat5e (Category 5e)
Shielding	FTP / F-UTP, polyester-aluminum foil, 100 percent coverage
Conductor	24 AWG solid bare copper (0.5 mm)
Insulation	HDPE, 0.96 mm nominal diameter
Jacket	FR PVC compound, 5.2 +/-0.2 mm diameter
Connector	Screened RJ45 male to RJ45 male
Impedance	100 ohm +/-5%
Insulation Resistance	5 G ohm/km minimum
Shield Termination	Foil carried to the plug shell at both ends
Compliance	ANSI/TIA/EIA-568-C.2, ISO/IEC 11801, IEC 61156-6
Flame Rating	IEC 60332-1-2, UL-1581 VW-1

Where shielding earns its cost

Unshielded cable is correct for the majority of office drops, and adding foil where it is not needed only raises cost and slows termination. Foil screening earns its place when the channel sits beside something that radiates: variable frequency drives, large transformers, radio equipment, or a long parallel run of power cable. The shielding works by giving the interfering field a low-impedance path to ground instead of letting it couple into the pairs.

Route condition	What you see without a screen	Screened cord worth it?
Beside a variable frequency drive	Random link drops correlated with motor speed	Yes
Parallel to power for a long distance	Errors at high utilization, fine when idle	Yes, if separation cannot be improved
Dense tray with many data cables	Alien crosstalk between adjacent channels	Usually yes at higher categories
Near radio or broadcast equipment	Burst errors and retraining	Yes, plus careful grounding
Normal office tray, data only	Nothing	No

The screen works only if it is continuous. The patch cord, the patch panel and the equipment cords all need to be shielded, and the installation needs a proper ground path. If any link in that chain is unshielded, the benefit largely disappears, and a screen that is left floating can behave worse than no screen at all.

The three mistakes that make a screened install pointless

Most screened installations that fail to deliver are not failures of the cable. They are failures of the termination and the grounding.

Screen not carried into the plug. A screened cable terminated into an unshielded plug leaves the foil stopping short of the connector, which is the one place it matters.
Drain wire dressed as a pigtail. A long pigtail is an inductor at the frequencies that matter. Terminate the screen 360 degrees into the connector shell.
Screen grounded at both ends in a building with a poor equipotential bond. This can circulate current in the screen and inject noise. Get the earthing philosophy right before the cable goes in, and follow the site standard where one exists.

Foil or braid, and what the coverage figure means

An overall foil screen gives 100 percent coverage at low weight and low cost, but it has higher transfer impedance than a braid and it is more delicate to terminate. Braid is mechanically stronger and better at low frequency, which is why heavy industrial constructions use foil on each pair plus an overall braid. For a Category 5e channel next to plant equipment, foil is usually the right balance; where the environment is severe, step up to the braided construction instead of doubling up on foil.

Foil – light, cheap, 100 percent coverage, needs careful termination.
Braid – stronger, better at low frequency, heavier and bulkier.
Both, per pair and overall – the heavy industrial answer, at a cost in stiffness and bend radius.

Where a cat5e ftp shielded cord gets installed

Plant rooms and factory floors where data runs beside switching equipment
Lift shafts and machinery rooms with large motors on the same route
Broadcast and AV installations with dense RF sources nearby
Hospital and laboratory installations with imaging equipment on the same riser
Retail and commercial sites where the data tray shares a route with power for long distances
Outdoor and buried routes, where our Cat5e FTP Outdoor / Direct-Burial Patch Cord is the jacket and construction you actually want

How to specify the build

Length of each cord, and whether they are all the same.
Plug type – screened RJ45 as standard; confirm the mating side is screened too.
Screen construction – overall foil, or a heavier construction for severe sites.
Grounding philosophy for the site, so the screen is terminated consistently.
Jacket and color, and whether the run needs a flame-rated compound.
Quantity, and whether this is a prototype or a production order.

Workmanship and testing

Cat5e FTP Shielded builds are made to IPC/WHMA-A-620 Class 3 workmanship inside an ISO 9001 system, over a 32 to 12 AWG range. continuity and pinout are verified on each Cat5e assembly before packing, and seal checking is quoted whenever an ingress rating is on the drawing.

Material declarations against RoHS and REACH are issued per project, alongside the dimensional and electrical reports agreed at quotation; see certifications, compliance and material declarations. Where your drawing names a UL style or another approval, the build follows your drawing and ships with the supporting document rather than a claim of our own. Production runs on the same lines described under the assembly lines behind this build, where cutting, termination, molding and 100 percent electrical verification sit under one roof. The wider context is covered under our industrial automation work. Tooling for this build is cut in our own tool room and belongs to your program, so a repeat run years later starts from the same tool.

Custom builds and ordering

For Cat5e FTP Shielded builds, prototypes run from 1 to 50 pcs with a 3 working day turnaround; volume orders begin at 500 pcs and ship 14 working days after approval. Tooling not already held adds around 10 working days. OEM and ODM Cat5e work ships under your part number and labeling, and material certificates and first-article reports come with them on request.

Ratings shown here are the industry-standard description of what the Cat5e FTP Shielded interface family is defined to do, not test results from a part of ours. Your assembly is built and verified to the values on your drawing, which we check against the supplier datasheet before quoting.

Related screened and industrial patch cords

Full ranges: Ethernet patch cords and signal and data cables.

Frequently Asked Questions

Do I need screened patch panels as well?

Yes. The screen has to be continuous from end to end. A screened cord plugged into an unscreened jack leaves the screen open at that point.

Should the screen be grounded at one end or both?

Follow the site earthing standard. Grounding both ends of a screen in a building with a poor equipotential bond can circulate current and make matters worse, so decide it as a system question, not a per-cable one.

Can I use a screened cord with unshielded equipment?

It will work, but you get little benefit. The screen needs somewhere to dump the current it collects; without a screened path on both sides it does very little.

Is foil enough next to a large drive?

Usually for Category 5e. Where the environment is severe, or where the run is long and close to the source, move to a braided or foil-per-pair construction rather than doubling the foil.