hide

IWCS USA White Paper: Alien CrossTalk Testing

telcos-banner

IWCS USA White Paper: Alien CrossTalk Testing

Abstract
The new cabling structure network and standards demand the higher speed and low latency network Datacom copper cables which requires compliance of the Alien crosstalk. The Power Sum Alien Crosstalk has been introduced to international standards ISO/IEC 11801 Ed. 2.2, ANSI/TIA 568C.2 and it is mandatory parameter for Category 6A and above copper LAN Cables. Alien Crosstalk is the interference caused by a pair of insulated copper conductors in one cable inducing noise into other pairs of insulated conductors in adjacent cables.

Power Sum Alien Crosstalk (PSANEXT) is an unwanted disturbing signal transferred from one balanced twisted pair of cable to twisted pair of another cable. The Alien Crosstalk is time consuming and usually takes 4 hours to prepare testing set up and test. It was demand on us to compare the different test method of the measurement and find a reliable conclusion about this form of crosstalk between different cables in a group or bundle, rather than between individual pairs or circuits within a single cable.

In our situation the same cable construction of Cat6a U/UTP was desired and our expectation was to find the different test results based on the different method of the alien crosstalk testing. By finding the most significant parameter we have saved significant amount of financial part for another development.

The second factor behind carrying out this correlation study was to avoid the repeated alien crosstalk testing which is a destructive testing in nature. Without more destructive testing we needed to ensure the alien crosstalk compliance in all produced cables.

Keywords: LAN Cable; Alien Crosstalk; Data Copper Cable; Margin; Performance; Cat6A; Network analyzer; Field analyzer, lay out, flared,

1. Introduction

The Power Sum Alien Crosstalk has been introduced to international standards ISO/IEC 11801 Ed. 2.2, ANSI/TIA 568C.2, IEC 61156-5 and it is mandatory for category 6A and above copper LAN Cables. Alien Crosstalk is the interference caused by a pair of insulated copper conductors in one cable inducing noise into other pairs of insulated conductors in adjacent cables as shown in Figure 1- Alien Crosstalk. Alien Crosstalk is an unwanted disturbing signal transferred from one balanced twisted pair of cable to twisted pair of another cable.

The Alien Crosstalk measurement results depends on the test method being followed for testing, type of test instrument and handling of cable during the testing. In this paper we have studied Alien Crosstalk Results with three different scenario of testing like,