# ethernet with underground power



## sil (Jul 20, 2018)

Within the same pipe? No. 
I would lay it in same trench with at least a foot seperation.


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## LARMGUY (Aug 22, 2010)

800-133

Nope


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## mikewillnot (Apr 2, 2013)

sil said:


> Within the same pipe? No.
> I would lay it in same trench with at least a foot seperation.


no trench. 

directional boring is tunneling through the ground like a giant flexible drill bit and then pulling in the tube after. No fuss up at grade level. 

and since the cable is direct burial, I'm thinking the conduit isn't a raceway anyway ... could be just a tube. 


that's why Im asking.


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## Cow (Jan 16, 2008)

I wouldn't recommend it.


I'd either have them bore it twice, power and ethernet, or have the customer install some wireless antennas to get ethernet out there.


Even if it worked now, if it ever quit one day or started having issues, the first thing that'll get pointed out is how the ethernet is ran right alongside the power, whether that's the problem or not.


Not worth the potential bad publicity in my opinion.


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## Kevin (Feb 14, 2017)

Use a point to point Ethernet system. They're like 300 dollars If I remember right. Mount one end on the house and other on the out building. Problem solved.

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## splatz (May 23, 2015)

I think this is permissible if there is a barrier between the communications and power, so if you ran the network cable in innerduct or something, you'd be OK. But you may not have room in a 2" tube. 

There are all kinds of fancy HDPE tubing for directional boring, some are segmented / sectioned so you could use one section for the ethernet ... that would probably fly. 

You seldom have problems with category 5 close to power - the twist in the pairs rejects noise pretty well - but this is a setup that's I'd really expect to make a lot of noise, long runs parallel to significant currant with no metallic barrier are where you do see noise. So I wouldn't try it, if I had to, it's one of the few places I'd use a shielded category 6 cable. 

But the right thing to run would be fiber, a MIC cable (interlocking armor like MC) would probably satisfy the requirement for a barrier separating data and power. No chance for interference, no chance for ground loops, no chance for surges to propagate. 

You can make a wireless point to point but really cables are always better than wireless.


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## MDShunk (Jan 7, 2007)

If the tube the boring contractor pulls in it open at one or both ends it is not a raceway. It's what the code calls "sleeving for protection" and conductors can share that same tube the same as they could share a trench or a set of bored holes in studs. These cables can't share a chapter 3 raceway, but they can share any other sleeve or tube not covered in chapter 3. Whether it's good design practice for an ethernet cable to share an intimate parallel run with power is for you to decide. History tells me that network cabling is not nearly as fussy as people want you to believe.


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## gpop (May 14, 2018)

Depending on the size of the back cutter you can have as many pipe as you like installed in one pull. As long as the back cutter comes up with no wire twisted around the blades its all good. (love that "oh s***, what the hell did we hit")


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## paulengr (Oct 8, 2017)

ULs issue with CAT-5 is they require all power cables to be at least 18 gauge for fault handling reasons while CAT 5 cannot be larger than 22 for capacitance reasons. It’s OK in power limited systems but not general chapter 3 raceways. The recommended practice is to separate with innerduct but in this case the raceway is the UF jacket so you’ve just kind of flipped things around.

As to noise, voltage isolation, etc., Ethernet is extremely resistant to any interference at all. Rockwell published some real world industrial tests back about 10 years ago but to simplify things Ethernet has 1500 V of isolation and a notch filter at DC up to at least 60 Hz that gives some 30 dB of protection (1000:1). There’s no technical or Code reason not to run the two together.

Armored CAT 5 is always tough to get but the armor is fir rodent proofing in direct burial. Or Belsen and CommScope among others sells 600 V AWM spec UTP which is basically CAT 5 with the same insulation as power cable. It is NOT Code in general use because of the 18 gauge silliness (1500 V of isolation and totally isolated from DC via balun transformers...come on UL the spec with Ethernet is stupid). But in your case no issues.


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## triden (Jun 13, 2012)

Belden 121872A


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## Nutmegger777 (Mar 14, 2014)

You can consider an Ethernet-over-power pair of devices.


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## Nukie Poo (Sep 3, 2012)

Use fiber optic cable in same conduit 


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## cuba_pete (Dec 8, 2011)

Powerline Ethernet. I use it in my shop, and it was a snap...no additional wiring involved. 

Tons of bandwidth, streaming video and all.


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## 99cents (Aug 20, 2012)

I have exactly the same situation right now. I was a nice guy and pulled a string along with my cable. Told the customer he was on his own after that.


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## volleyball (Sep 14, 2011)

That is too far to run the ethernet alongside the power. 

I would say best to run another bore far enough away. A customer who is savvy enough to want a physical wire will know that things would change and they will need a different wire in the future. Suggest even running fiber as well as coax at the same time.
I would not bother with cat5 at all. You can go cat 6 or 7 and get better crosstalk protection from the start.


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## paulengr (Oct 8, 2017)

volleyball said:


> That is too far to run the ethernet alongside the power.
> 
> I would say best to run another bore far enough away. A customer who is savvy enough to want a physical wire will know that things would change and they will need a different wire in the future. Suggest even running fiber as well as coax at the same time.
> I would not bother with cat5 at all. You can go cat 6 or 7 and get better crosstalk protection from the start.


Uhh there is no such thing currently as CAT 7. Well sort of. CAT 7 CABLE exists and the connector is basically an RJ-45 but with extra pins. The conductors are individually shielded (think coax like VGA cables) so its flat. But so far there are no network cards that support it so everything is limited to CAT 5E standards. Eventually the cards will be available though. CAT 7 is a significant (but expensive) upgrade specifically intended for 10 gigabit Ethernet, not quite there yet. And its really more meant for patch cords (short runs) without the fear of potential issues with CAT 5E/6. So nobidy "sees" an issue since it never hits the CAT 5E length limit on effectuvely a low noise CAT 6 connection (diwngraded at the NIC). But between buildings ALL standards recommend fiber for isolation, noise, lightning immunity, bandwidth, and cost. So if you're going for a high end system, go the full distance.

CAT 6 just separates the contractors who know what they are doing from those who don't. CAT 5E is good for 100 MHz raw bandwidth. Gigabit Ethernet works just fine on it up to a full 100 m. 10 Gbps works too up to about 10 m. CAT 6 doubles raw bandwidth to 200 MHz but still only supports gigabit to 100 m and 10 Gbps goes 10 m...same thing. No SINR upgrade. Nothing supports or ever will support CAT 6 except as extra expensive CAT-5E. The only big advantage of CAT 6 is it is more rounded so it pulls easier.

As to power interference, the Ethernet standard has a notch at 60 Hz in the spectrum both in the signal patterns and in the standard isolation transfirmer so it blocks 60 Hz. Rockwell Automation did tons of tests trying to cause errors on Ethernet even wrapping about 100 feet on a welding robot and taping it directly to a high power feeder for a few hundred feet but failed to even cause a few bits of error. It's 30+ dB of SNR...that's 1000 times stronger signal than noise or interference. That was UTP. Going to ScTP raises it to 32 dB...not enough to justify it for anything other than lightning protection. I have heard of cases of purported interference but they always end up as bad grounding or badly internally designed cards.

When Allen Bradley got in bed with Belden and Cisco they published this:

http://literature.rockwellautomation.com/idc/groups/literature/documents/wp/enet-wp007_-en-p.pdf
http://literature.rockwellautomation.com/idc/groups/literature/documents/wp/1585-wp001_-en-p.pdf

Note that the article completely IGNORES built in Ethernet error correction intentionally. It is addressing communications quality without the full Ethernet physical and transport layer protection. They tried to claim needing an insane 56 dB SINR which no communication system can possibly achieve or would ever need. So then they push some stuff that is close to that.

In a previous circa 2007 article they ran a hundred feed of CAT 5 in a high power distribution cable tray as well as wrapped all over a welding robot and found there were bit errors if you look at the raw packets but the built in Ethernet stuff hid it to the point where they could only be seen with network tools. That was before they were making huge profits on Cisco and Belden private labelled hardware and kicked out for instance Hirschmann that makes far superior industrial grade Ethernet switches for the cheap office crap Cisco makes.

This article tests "good" and "bad" CAT 5/5E cable against good and bad NIC cards:
https://www.wband.com/resources/whitepapers/Ethernet_Without_Rewiring_White%20Paper_802.pdf

It makes the point that 99% of the time it's not a cable issue, it's a crummy Ethernet card issue.

So be careful with claims that CAT 6 or 7 is better (it isnt).

If CAT 5/5E/6/7 was in an MC jacket that would qualify as a raceway and make it isolated, but it's not because it would have to be 18 AWG (UL power cable rule). It can be PLTC though which Belden and Commscope sell which can run in power limited raceways. Some versions are 600 V AWM rated so they have the same jacket as 600 V cable but because it's not 18+ gauge it can't be used in article 310 applications. Allen Bradley uses it in their smart MCCs and you could the wrap it to bus in the MCC where it's a Listed assembly but not when it exits the MCC into general use. It's a short circuit issue even though Ethernet uses 1500 V RMS isolation transformers at each end so this would never apply in practice. The armored CAT cables are for rodent proofing in direct burial...not a raceway but simply a sleeve. Yeah it's the same stuff as type MC cable but since the wire itself can't be a power conductor it can't be classed as MC.

Finally ask yourself if 10 gigabit even makes sense. Home WAN connections are usually sub 1 Mbps in practice with a few cases of 40-100 Mbps raw bandwidth of fiber, no matter the purported throughput claims of cable companies claiming over 100 Mbps. Netflix is happy at 4k at about 3 Mbps. Sustained hard drive transfers reach maybe 300 Mbps. Even SSDs barely reach over 500 Mbos. Wireless power line stuff now does 200-300 Mbps and With is getting over 500 Mbps on cheap hardware. See for instance Ubiquiti which opens Atheros chips up to their full potential. So no matter how much in the future you look I just don't see even gigabit in the home being much of a limitation. Wireless has met or exceeded everything but single mode coarse wavelength division and similar multiplexing.

At my house I have 3 wireless routers, two basically as extenders, talking via power line Ethernet. Fixed boxes like game systems and Tv's are on the Ethernet power line modems while handheld stuff is wireless, with 2 teenage kids and occasional visits fro m grandparents that are constantly streaming multiple feeds. No issues with this at all.

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## volleyball (Sep 14, 2011)

I hoped you cut and pasted. Lots of info but I think misses the point. I have rewired my house several times since the mid 80's when I ran my first network. 

That first one was 1mb way before there were cat or categories. Ethernet was RG-6 or 58. 

There is no such thing as future proofing. And before you know grandma will be wanting speeds most cannot imagine. 

There is cat 7 now, you can use current connectors on it and change it in the future.
No matter what you put in, somebody will be cursing you some time in the future.
Maybe you'll be dead, maybe still working. And it is the homeowner who pays the bill so I'd offer it.
I know guys who worked at ISP's and some have failed to plan for upgrades buying the company mantra that they are near practical max. And failed to even run conduit runs.
It is just what I would do. If someone doesn't feel needed then go with that.


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## triden (Jun 13, 2012)

"640K ought to be enough for anybody" - Bill Gates


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## telsa (May 22, 2015)

triden said:


> "640K ought to be enough for anybody" - Bill Gates


That's obvious on its face. :devil3:


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## 99cents (Aug 20, 2012)

I just finished a job almost identical. The customer was aware that there could be noise problems. There is no electrical code issue. If that’s what he wants, give him what he wants but there are no guarantees. Running another poly pipe just for data will be worth some money.

I put in a Canadian USEB cable with the neutral wrapped around the hots. Maybe that provides some shielding, I don’t know.


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## splatz (May 23, 2015)

99cents said:


> I put in a Canadian USEB cable with the neutral wrapped around the hots. Maybe that provides some shielding, I don’t know.


Interesting question ... I think it would provide your power cable some protection from noise from the ethernet but I am not sure about vice versa :biggrin:


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## oliquir (Jan 13, 2011)

forget old school ethernet cable and run fiber optic cable, ethernet to fiber converters are now cheap and can get faster speeds for future consideration


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## Cow (Jan 16, 2008)

99cents said:


> I put in a *Canadian USEB cable with the neutral wrapped around the hots*. Maybe that provides some shielding, I don’t know.



I don't know what that is? Sounds like SE cable. We aren't allowed to run that underground though, even in conduit.



I honestly didn't know Canadians used anything but teck for almost everything?


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## 99cents (Aug 20, 2012)

Cow said:


> I don't know what that is? Sounds like SE cable. We aren't allowed to run that underground though, even in conduit.
> 
> 
> 
> I honestly didn't know Canadians used anything but teck for almost everything?


Yep, it looks like USEB is like your SE only for underground use. Sure, we use tech but sometimes there are less expensive options.


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