Cat7 Patch Cords, Fully Shielded

Cat7 needs one piece of honesty before anything else, because most suppliers skip it. Category 7 is an ISO/IEC 11801 cabling class — Class F — not a TIA category. Its native connectors in the standard are GG45 and TERA, not RJ45. In practice, virtually every "Cat7 patch cord" on the market, ours included, is Class F cable terminated to RJ45, which means the channel behaves to Cat6A connector limits even though the cable itself is specified far above them.

That is not a reason to avoid it. It is a reason to buy it for what it genuinely gives you: a very heavily shielded cable, individually foiled pairs under an overall braid, in an installation where noise is the problem you are actually solving.

What you are buying

Where the shielding earns its money

• Industrial floors with variable-speed drives, welders and large motors putting energy into every cable tray on site.
• Broadcast, studio and AV installations where a single interference event is visible or audible to an audience.
• Medical and laboratory environments running sensitive instrumentation alongside the network.
• Dense patch fields where alien crosstalk between adjacent cords is the limiting factor, not the cable's own performance.
• Building services and BMS runs sharing containment with power cabling.

The part installers get wrong

A shield only works if it is continuous and correctly bonded. Three failures account for most disappointing Cat7 installations:

1. The shield stops at the boot. The braid must be bonded to the plug's shell, and the shell must mate with a shielded outlet. A shielded cord into an unshielded jack is an unshielded channel.
2. Both ends bonded into different earths. That creates a current path through the shield. Follow the designed earthing scheme rather than improvising per rack.
3. Cat6A jacks with Cat7 cable. Perfectly reasonable, and very common — but the channel then performs to the connector, not to the cable. Specify with that in mind.

We build the cord; the bonding scheme is the designer's. What we can guarantee is that the shield is continuous through our termination, and that the finished cord is Fluke-tested before it ships.

Cat7 or Cat6A?

A straight answer, because it saves budget: if the requirement is 10GBASE-T to 100 m in a normal commercial environment, Cat6A does it, costs less and installs more easily. Choose Cat7 when the electrical environment is genuinely hostile, when a specification you cannot change calls for Class F, or when you want the heaviest shielding available on RJ45 hardware.

Wider Cable has manufactured Ethernet cable since 2005 with raw-material-to-finished control across facilities in Dongguan, China and Hưng Yên, Vietnam. We will quote whichever of the two fits your project, and say which one we would specify.

Certification and testing

Fluke test results ship with the order. We hold UL, c(UL), ETL, CPR, RoHS, REACH, CE, SGS, ISO and TÜV across the range, attached to the constructions that genuinely carry them.

Related: Cat7 Ethernet cables · Cat8 patch cables · Cat6A patch cables

Common questions

Is a Cat7 patch cord with RJ45 connectors genuine Cat7?

The cable is Class F; the connector is RJ45, which is not the standard's native Class F connector. It is a legitimate and widely used product — just specify it knowing the channel performs to the connector.

Do I need shielded outlets to use Cat7 cords?

To get the shielding benefit, yes. A shielded cord into an unshielded jack gives you an unshielded channel and the extra cost buys nothing.

Do you make flat Cat7?

Yes — an F/UTP flat construction for under-carpet, trunking and tight-radius routing, alongside the round S/FTP line.

Can you supply custom lengths and colours?

Yes. Lengths from 0.2 m to 25 m, around nine colours, plus boot style, labelling, packaging and private-label branding on OEM orders.