Gold Ethernet cables

March 19, 2014   Uncategorized

In class on Friday, a story was told about someone who went to Office Depot (I think it was Office Depot. Office max? Staples? One of those) and bought gold-plated Ethernet cables. Or gold-wired, or gold-something. I interpreted that to mean the ends of the cable were gold plated as sometimes happens with other analog cables like this one or this one or these. I was intrigued, because gold-plating Ethernet cable connectors would do absolutely nothing.

So I went to the local office supply store to see what they had. I found the Belkin Cat6 (Category 6) Ethernet cable that you can see below; Ethernet cable is usually the blue or grey networking cable you may have at home. Cat6 has higher transmission speeds than Cat5, but is also more expensive. Both Cat5 and Cat6 are a type of Ethernet cable, which is a type of twisted-pair wire as we discussed in class. Standard phone-line is also twisted-pair but a much lower transmission rate. Cat5 Ethernet cable usually has about 3 twists per inch, although manufacturers differ.

Note in the second picture it says, under point ‘C,’ that the cable has “50 micro-inches of gold for better conductivity.” Gold is *not* a better conductor than copper which is the standard wire type used in these cables, including the ones in the pictures, but it is more resilient as it won’t corrode. Also, standards for Cat6 cable connectors make no mention of gold, their specifications already minimize noise and subsequent possibility of crosstalk – the signal jumping from one of the twisted wires to the other – as we talked about on Friday. 
Also, a micro-inch is one millionth of an inch. It’s not much, even 50 micro-inches isn’t much. I very seriously doubt that the 50 micro-inches of gold touted on the package, but not explained in any detail, do anything for performance. The price difference between this and standard Cat5 is $10 ($14 vs. $24), but Cat6 *may possibly* provide an improvement if you are doing a lot of data transfer. For a standard home network Cat5 should be fine.