without looking at the actual effects it had on network performance, made the premature conclusion
They didn't need to look at the "actual effects".
The very smart engineers who created the high speed Ethernet standards have already studied the "actual effects". They spent years designing, studying, analyzing, and characterizing.
The designers distilled their efforts into some simpler rules such as "near end crosstalk (NEXT) shall not exceed ...".
Those simpler rules allowed a company like Fluke to build a test instrument that checks for things like crosstalk and delay skew and report PASS and FAIL and even report how far off the cable was from meeting the requirements.
That's all there is to it. It's ludicrous to ask for an ab initio analysis of every network problem that could be possibly encountered.
It may eventually be necessary to study "actual effects" in a particular network, but only after dispensing with low hanging fruit such as poorly terminated cables.
There is also the long term labor costs of breaking what amounts to a standard API.
Perhaps this mfgr card will work on a almost-but-not-quite cat5 cable run, but that new one won't, or that other one only works half the time, and slowly, or that one won't work when that other fluorescent light is on. The labor cost of this kind of troubleshooting can be pretty spectacular compared to a cheap and simple "must conform to cat-5 minimum standards".
Its rather like AC line voltage. True, some stuff, sometimes, will work at 100 volts or 150 volts, but I'd call an electrician and get it fixed before you spend a lifetime troubleshooting individual things that won't work reliably and consistently at 100 or 150 volts.
Comments
They didn't need to look at the "actual effects".
The very smart engineers who created the high speed Ethernet standards have already studied the "actual effects". They spent years designing, studying, analyzing, and characterizing.
The designers distilled their efforts into some simpler rules such as "near end crosstalk (NEXT) shall not exceed ...".
Those simpler rules allowed a company like Fluke to build a test instrument that checks for things like crosstalk and delay skew and report PASS and FAIL and even report how far off the cable was from meeting the requirements.
That's all there is to it. It's ludicrous to ask for an ab initio analysis of every network problem that could be possibly encountered.
It may eventually be necessary to study "actual effects" in a particular network, but only after dispensing with low hanging fruit such as poorly terminated cables.
There is also the long term labor costs of breaking what amounts to a standard API.
Perhaps this mfgr card will work on a almost-but-not-quite cat5 cable run, but that new one won't, or that other one only works half the time, and slowly, or that one won't work when that other fluorescent light is on. The labor cost of this kind of troubleshooting can be pretty spectacular compared to a cheap and simple "must conform to cat-5 minimum standards".
Its rather like AC line voltage. True, some stuff, sometimes, will work at 100 volts or 150 volts, but I'd call an electrician and get it fixed before you spend a lifetime troubleshooting individual things that won't work reliably and consistently at 100 or 150 volts.