bundle of cables before the traffic through those cables is affected

The most widely recognized standards for network cabling have been published by the Telecommunications Industry Association and Electronics Industries Alliance (TIA/EIA). Unfortunately, those standards don’t specify the physical method to secure cables, but it’s generally understood that if you tie cables too tight, the cable’s geometry will be affected, possibly Twinax cables deforming the copper, modifying the twisted pairs or otherwise physically causing performance degradation. This understanding begs the question of whether zip ties are inherently inferior to hook & loop ties for network cabling applications.The first myth (that zip ties can negatively impact network performance) is entirely valid, but its significance is much greater in theory than it is in practice. While I couldn’t track down any scientific experiments that demonstrate the maximum tension a cable tie can exert on a bundle of cables before high quality the traffic through those cables is affected, I have a good amount of empirical evidence to fall back on from SoftLayer data centers. Since 2006, SoftLayer has installed more than 400,000 patch cables in data centers around the world (using zip ties), and we’ve *never* encountered a fault in a network cable that was the result of a zip tie being over-tightened … And we’re not shy about tightening those ties.