CCA LAN CABLE INTRODUCTION.

With the price of copper going up, people start looking for ways in which to cut cost, and found an old method called cladding. Manufacturers take steel or aluminum and coat or clad it with a thin layer of copper. As consumers can imagine, both steel and aluminum are a lot cheaper than copper, and still conduct electricity, although not nearly as well.
The use of CCA (copper clad aluminum) wire in a twisted pair network cable is not permitted by the IEC or CENELEC in their cable standards, and the lack of any kind of standardisation with relation to the ratios of copper and aluminum means that any testing by the industry can only be relevant to the actual piece of cable being analysed.
3P, an organisation that provides third party testing for compliance with industry standards in cable manufacturing, strongly advises against the use of CCA wire in a twisted pair network cable.
The use of CCA wire directly contravenes both CAT5e and CAT6 specifications, which denote the use of copper conductors. CCA wire is not a copper conductor. Organisations supplying CCA as CAT5e and CAT6 network cables should examine very carefully if they are in compliance with the Sale of Goods Act.
This is only one of the potential problems with CCA. When users start looking at POE over this CCA type of cable, especially in the CCTV field, there is real concern that the continuous power being drawn by the cameras will cause heat build up not only in the cable, but in the equipment – leading to failure of equipment, or even worse.
Because of the higher resistance (attenuation) of this cable, much higher that the IEEE standards are meant for, there will also be more packet loss in the physical layer of the network. This will cause more packets to be re-transmitted, ultimately leading to a much slower network. Because of the attenuation of the CCA cable, it will not perform on long runs.
For the installers, the CCA cable does not have the same tensile strength as copper cable, and will get damaged more easily than copper cable. This will lead to numerous problems on site, and will eventually cost users more than buying copper cable from the outset.