Reader lambastes shielded-cabling coverage

In a guest-commentary article that will be published in Cabling Installation & Maintenance's June issue, magazine reader Gautier Humbert takes the magazine's editor to task for authoring an article that Humbert believes tells only one side of a technical story. Humbert is a business development manager for Legrand in East and Central Europe. The article with which Humbert takes issue is The technical realities of twisted-pair beyond 10G, published in the magazine's April 2011 issue. That article, authored by magazine editor Patrick McLaughlin (OK, I'll admit it, that's me), was derived in large part from a Web-delivered seminar that took place in January. That seminar was entitled Twisted-Pair Cabling and Higher-Than-10G Transmission, and can be seen and heard here. During the seminar, presenters told of the then-current state of affairs within standards bodies to establish bona fide cabling and/or networking standards through which twisted-pair cabling systems would support Ethernet transmission at 40 Gbits/sec. The seminar also included discussion of the reasons such standards efforts are being proposed -- or, said differently, the seminar included advocacy for such standards proposals.

In his commentary article, Humbert makes the argument that foiled/unshielded twisted-pair (F/UTP) cabling, not shielded/foiled twisted-pair (S/FTP) cabling, is likely to be the medium of the future. The article and corresponding seminar included significant information about the characteristics of S/FTP cabling. In addition to making an argument based on a combination of technical and market factors, Humbert chastises McLaughlin (me) for penning an article that told just a single side of the story. He says, "The fact that some manufacturers use tools like one-viewpoint white papers to push their solutions is not new. If any company wants to do this, I think they have the right to. But for this magazine to support it, I believe, is a mistake."

Cabling Installation & Maintenance's June issue will be mailed to subscribers in the middle of the month and will be available online at approximately the same time.

Rather than take a defensive posture and develop creative ways to challenge Gautier Humbert's stance, I'll recall one of the more famous lines from U.S. Senator Scott Brown's campaign, in which he won the Senate seat that had been vacated with the passing of the late Senator Edward Kennedy. During one of Brown's debates with Massachusetts's Attorney General Martha Coakley, Brown stated (and I'm paraphrasing here but you can watch it on YouTube), "It's not Kennedy's seat. It's the people's seat." In a similar vein, Cabling Installation & Maintenance is not my magazine. I'm privileged to serve as its editor and I hope that in doing so, I'm actually serving you. My own inherently biased opinion about the value of that article in our April issue is not what matters. Your opinion is what matters.