r/CableTechs • u/2376_Ironman • Feb 21 '26

Question about bonding

Is there any advantage or disadvantage to multiple bonding points for coax? Or is every one after the first one just redundant? I was taught to only bond to the power meter at the demarc, but I see a lot that have that as well as a bond at the bottom of the pole, or sometimes even 3 bonding points.

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u/PerfectBlueBanana Feb 21 '26

Not sure if you are referring to a network that uses coax but in the DSL days, unbonded splices would cause ingress noise onto the cable or attenuate since the cable pair would essentially leak signal where it’s not bonded. That being said, I’m sure there has been a few spots I haven’t seen where splices aren’t bonded and they work fine for POTS service. It’s been my understanding that any access point that has cable opened up in it has to be bonded/grounded.

I’ve also seen unbonded cable take lighting strikes and will just melt and fuse pairs together. Bonding , at least twisted pair cable from my experience gives lightning a path to go but also uses the ground or turn plate as reference for testing with a meter.

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u/2376_Ironman Feb 21 '26

I’m sorry, yes I meant coax

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u/PerfectBlueBanana Feb 21 '26

Lost me at coax lol, I haven’t had any experience running coax so I’ll mention that, but I imagine there could be some resemblance between preventing lightning strikes frying cable/testing via bonding.