I am pondering the above quote, and wonder why that advice is being offered, when T1 lines are often sent from a CO to a subscriber's premises over miles of Cat-nuttin', in regular subscriber OSP.
Perhaps you can explain it to me?
During the miles of cat-nuttin', it might very well be carried on a single pair... so there's no reason to care. Once it comes inside, and becomes 2 pair. Then the longer those two pairs are in contact, the more distorted the signals will get, and Cat5 is actually the worst, because after the twists, 10 feet of cable is at least 12 feet of wire.
I know this because my customers often use any standard Cat5 cable to connect between their smart jacks and my dialers, and sometimes a cross over between the dialer and channel banks or other equipment. They can usually get away with it, as long as the distances are short... like a standard 2m patch cable (6 feet).
But then there was this one customer whose IT department was at odds with the communications department, and tried to put the dialer in the server room, while their PBX was in the phone room. Both rooms were quite sizable, so the cable they used was a 50 foot Cat5e patch cord. They wondered why the recordings they were doing were so scrambled.... We didn't realize this cabling issue immediately, of course. First we tried replacing the hardware, and swapping ports on their switch. The best part was when the tech who ran the cable, said in his whiny voice, "But we used Cat5e - the best there is!" Great for a 350Mhz signal... not so great for a 1.5Mhz signal
My recommendation of 10-15 feet, is from some testing I did. I cut Cat5 cable to lengths of 5, 10, 15, 20, 25, and 30 feet. I punched them down to a jack on each end (crossed over) connected to two different Dialogic T1 cards using 3 foot Cat3 patch cords (additional 6 feet). Then played an audio file from one end, and recorded it on the other. I could definitely notice the distortion on the 20 foot cable... it was probably tolerable to someone not listening for it, though. But audio distortion is one thing... the OP's data T1 won't like it much.
I don't think 200 feet is going to work so well for you....
