retractable network cable (cat5e preferred)

[dualblade]

i'm trying to find a good retractable network cable that will work well in a business environment. my company has tried out a few different ones, but find that they break easily or don't work well at gigabit speeds. the ones that are not twisted pair will have trouble with interference at high speeds it seems. i'd like to have a bunch available so that when several users are sitting at a conference room table, the table isn't overrun with standard cables. since i know this crowd is made up of IT professionals, i was hoping that someone had some good experience with a retractable cable around 7ft long. thanks for any advice

 

[Beer Ninja]

You will most likely not find a retractable Ethernet Cord that is capable of meeting EIA/TIA standards. This is bad. Most Patch Cables Exceed the standards. Cat 5e should not be bent at all. It is recommended that you can only do a 90 degree bend in Ethernet cord or you will stretch out and deform the copper resulting in lower bandwidth and more Cross Talk.

In a retractable thing a ma jigger it would be major bending.

Solution, Wireless, raceway, or something real cool would be a Vista Column by Ortronics.

 

[Beer Ninja]

You can bend ethernet cord up to 8x the Outside Diameter of the cable.

 

[dualblade]

wireless is an eventual goal, but i'm looking for a wired solution for now. getting ethernet to the table was not difficult. there are little doors in the middle of the table with ports being fed by a pair of gigabit switches mounted under the table. the issue is the "last mile". we're plugging standard network cable into the ports on the table and it makes the table very cluttered where you get 15 or so people in a meeting/training session who need their laptops. i was hoping to find something that was good and retractable. do any of the thin cables handle traffic well or do they have the same pitfalls as the retractable ones?

 

[teststrips]

the wind-up cables always seem to be junk. I'd suggest using normal cables and learning the zen of cable management.

or go wireless. We started out with a totally seprate wireless network that we could hit the internet, but not our inside stuff... if we needed access to inside stuff, we'd just get on the VPN. Now we use Cisco PEEP to authenticate for our laptops but vendors can still hit the public network (dual SSIDs).

 

[LoStMaTt]

http://www.smartdesks.com/computer-cable-connection-connector-box.asp

Check out the above website. It sounds like you guys just need a better conference table. If laptops are brought to the table often, this is really the only way to go. You can either modify the table you already have or just look into the purchase of a new one.

I have bought quite a few different configurations from CBT, they have worked well.

 

[Beer Ninja]

Can you run the wires under the table somehow?

Mount a patch panel directly in the middle (under) with cable management going to each seat?

 

[Awal]

http://www.dealextreme.com/details.dx/sku.473~r.92757650

That may not work very well, but you can't beat the price.