Enterprise ethernet surge protection

[viSci]

Not really a LV question but regarding distributed systems installations...

I have a large scale system that involve multibuilding LAN interconnects that is plagued by surge damage.  

From what I can gather, external (where cables come into the building)  LAN surge protection and grounding is best.  Does anyone have any equipment recommendations 

or guidelines on the subject?

 

Thanks

[Rolf Kalbermatter]

Not really a LV question but regarding distributed systems installations...

I have a large scale system that involve multibuilding LAN interconnects that is plagued by surge damage.  

From what I can gather, external (where cables come into the building)  LAN surge protection and grounding is best.  Does anyone have any equipment recommendations 

or guidelines on the subject?

 

Thanks

 

Are you a network engineer? This is quite specialized matter and I would not dare to start doing this without consulting a specialist in installing network infrastructure. The wrong protection circuit could rather slow down your network traffic and not really protect your network much from real surges. In general there is almost no technology that will not at least get fried itself by a direct lightning stroke to the installation or any attached appliance. But for less strong environmental impacts you still need to know quite a bit about both the network characteristics in question and the possible surges that you have. Is it static electricity or rather something else?

[viSci]

Yeah I should probably stay out of it but as the only electrical / software engineer on the team I was asked to make a suggestion.

Really as you say it requires specialized knowledge.  I like to be able to understand the root causes and fix the problem

at the root rather than a bandage approach.  Here in Florida (the lightning capitol of the world) surge damage is very serious concern.

From what I have read, CAT5 surge protection should be done where cables come into the building and should be afforded a direct low resistance path to earth ground.

The Telco's seemed to have solved this problem so I would be interested to understand their approach to grounding and surge protection.

[Rolf Kalbermatter]

Yeah I should probably stay out of it but as the only electrical / software engineer on the team I was asked to make a suggestion.

Really as you say it requires specialized knowledge.  I like to be able to understand the root causes and fix the problem

at the root rather than a bandage approach.  Here in Florida (the lightning capitol of the world) surge damage is very serious concern.

From what I have read, CAT5 surge protection should be done where cables come into the building and should be afforded a direct low resistance path to earth ground.

The Telco's seemed to have solved this problem so I would be interested to understand their approach to grounding and surge protection.

 

Telco's have indeed to deal with this all the time. And I would suspect these components to be a significant part of the cost of any switching station they put somewhere in the field. It could very well be that the price of their solutions would kill your superiors, when they hear it .

 

I only remember something about what they did for military grade radio devices at a place I used to work more than 20 years ago. They put in so called Transzorb diodes into the device for every signal path that was going to any outside connecter. Quite a few dozen in fact and each of them cost something like $ 100 back then and could be damaged easily during the soldering process of the PCBs. Granted they were supposed to not just help with lightning but even the EMP that would happen during some nuclear explosion but if that really would work and really would still matter when it happened is another story.