South Africa is not unique in that it is a predominately "UTP" country - as most of our data cabling installations are "Unshielded Twisted Pair" installations and so is most of the United States. Integrators/Installers are trained for UTP installation and most sites do not have adequate bonding and grounding infrastructure for grounded FTP or STP installations. In South Africa we use a lot of PVC skirting and most buildings do not have a dedicated earthing system for the data cabling infrastructure.
So what is the problem, "UTP" has been working very well for us and most of the United States of America for a very long time?
Well, shielded cabling is almost mandatory to fully comply with the IEEE 802.3an cabling standards and to truly obtain the necessary performance to run 10 GBase-T over copper twisted pair cabling. As we know 10 Gbase-T applications are a reality and the hardware to run these applications are already available.
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