The topic Flat Ethernet cables look great — but there’s a catch is currently the subject of lively discussion — readers and analysts are keeping a close eye on developments.
This is taking place in a dynamic environment: companies’ decisions and competitors’ reactions can quickly change the picture.
Ethernet cables come in many different colors, but they really only come in two shapes: the normal, round variety, and then the flat variant. The latter has become very popular in homes and offices everywhere for their ability to blend into a baseboard or be run underneath a rug or carpet, and are some of the best-selling cables on Amazon. It’s easy to see the appeal, but before you order hundreds of feet and start routing them through your home, it’s worth understanding what you’re actually trading away, because flat Ethernet does come with a set of very real drawbacks.
I’ve long been a proponent of hardwiring my internet connection to any device that will allow it in my home. These are my top reasons why.
To understand why flat cables have limitations, it helps to know what makes a standard round Ethernet cable work. Inside a conventional round cable, the copper conductors are organized into four twisted pairs, and each pair is twisted at a specific rate, and those rates differ between pairs. This has a real engineering reason behind it: the twisting of each pair causes the magnetic fields that each conductor generates within the cable to cancel each other out, dramatically reducing crosstalk and other interference. You can see how the pairs protrude from the poorly crimped cable in the first photo above. If crimped properly and not exposed, the round cable is great at withstanding interference and crosstalk.
Flat cables technically still contain four twisted pairs, but the pairs themselves aren’t twisted together relative to each other. They actually sit in a fixed parallel plane, which undermines what the twisting is supposed to accomplish. Those parallel wires can act like antennas, making flat cables much more vulnerable to crosstalk and EMI, which degrades the signal.
In practical terms, this can result in dropped packets, signal unreliability, and an overall poor connection. This matters a lot more the higher you push the bandwidth and length of the cable: a gigabit might be fine, but once you start reaching 5 or 10 Gbps, you can start to run into serious crosstalk issues once you start doing anything demanding. And this is in a best-case scenario for these cables if they’re in tip-top shape running in a completely flat line, which isn’t the usual use case for them.
Signal integrity aside, flat cables have a durability problem. Round cables distribute mechanical stress evenly around their circumference, which is part of why they hold up well over time. Flat cables don’t have that advantage. They have greater sensitivity to bending, so if you bend one a little too tightly, or it becomes bunched up under that rug you’ve run it underneath, you’re risking internal damage to the conductors within that can cause real connection problems.
And this is the real catch of using flat Ethernet cables: they’re quite good at bending around corners and being tucked into tight spaces, and so people are more likely to route them in ways that stress the cable. This is around sharp baseboard corners, pinched under furniture legs, or jammed into door frame gaps. Each of those compromises is quietly degrading the cable’s performance and shortening its lifespan.
Standard round Ethernet cables are some of the most easily repairable cables around. With a little bit of patience and the right tools, you can crimp your own cables or patch one up. Flat cables, by contrast, are extremely difficult to terminate properly, and for most people it’s effectively impossible without specialized tooling. If you damage the connector end of a flat cable or have damage somewhere in the middle, the practical answer is usually to throw the cable away and buy another one. Some flat cables may have jackets that can be easily stripped, but in the example I’ve shown above, the plastic jacket isn’t a shell as it is on round cables, but instead, a full encasement that fills the gaps between the conductors. The conductors are effectively enveloped in this plastic material, making stripping it away pretty much impossible. There are flat cables that do not have this issue, but all the Cat6 ones I’ve had are constructed this way.
Because of this lack of repairability, it’s impossible to cut down cables that are too long for your use, too. Because they come in pre-cut lengths, if you buy 20 or 30 more feet than you need, you’re stuck with that length and need to find a spot for it, stuffing it behind furniture or in a cabinet somewhere, which has the potential to cause more issues.
I didn’t expect a single cable could bring my network to its knees.
A flat Cat 6 cable running five feet across a room to a smart TV, a game console, or a streaming device is not going to cause you network problems. At short distances and gigabit speeds, the signal integrity differences between flat and round cables are small enough that you’re unlikely to measure them, let alone notice them during normal use. The same applies to temporary setups, like if you’re running a cable across a floor for a LAN party or a short-term home office arrangement, and you want something that disappears underfoot, a flat cable is a reasonable tool for the job.
The aesthetic appeal is also real. If you’re routing a cable through a finished room and you want it to be as invisible as possible, the slim profile of a flat cable is genuinely better suited to running along baseboards or under door transitions than a bulky round cable would be.
Running Ethernet through your walls seems scary, but it’s really not that bad.
Unless you’re running multi-gig across your home and need those signals to be rock solid, a flat cable is perfectly fine for standard gigabit use. Round cables will always be better in the technical aspects, but they’re not as clean to run throughout your home. I wouldn’t treat them as a default, but rather, as a convenience pick. If being wired in is a must, but you also need the cable run to not stick out like a sore thumb, there’s nothing wrong with a flat cable.