RJ45 ribbon cable

First, I have to vent for a moment.

I'm not a network engineer, I am a system integrator in defense. Naturally, every cabinet I work on has some sort of network connectivity but the vast majority of the time any issues I have to chase down are configuration problems.

For the past two weeks, we've been trying to determine why an external piece of equipment that's connected to my unit was getting in a jacked up (like, a boat can't go to sea with this jacked up) state. Because my unit is brand new and never deployed all suspicion was on me. The external equipment is not built by us but built by a partner, so naturally they're inclined to blame my unit as well.

EEs insisted it was a power / grounding issue based on the fact that manipulating (or even touching) some connections on the front of one of the unit elements would cause problems. As much as I tried to insist this wasn't possible I was pretty much overruled and ended up down a grounding/power debug rabbit hole. If you've ever been there you know how much it sucks.

As it turns out, there's a media converter tray just above the element in question and you pretty much can't touch or manipulate the connectors everyone was blaming without gently brushing them. Yesterday, while doing power checks for the thousandth time I noticed a link light on the media converter go out when BARELY touching the ribbon cable. Even blowing on it was enough to cause issues.

I'm pretty sure that wasn't always happening... I think it's been bad all along, but only NOW is it bad enough to make the link light go out / server go offline / etc. In fact while disturbing it to prove to others that's where the issue lied I eventually broke the cable to the point it doesn't work at all.

Anyway, that's the end of the rant... I lost a LOT of time over something so simple.

I've never had any experience with that flat ribbon cable. Manufacturing is now using them because they improve cabinet airflow but I'm concerned about their fragility. This particular one got to the point where ANY movement side-to-side (in the lengthwise direction or whatever) would cause problems. Literally WALKING by the unit would break things sometimes.

Does anyone have lots of experience with these, and how would you say they compare to traditional round cables? I know I'm biased because I now have only one experience with them (and it's bad) but I'm not certain they're reliable enough for my application. I think I need to go back to the HW folks and we need to reassess whether we want to use them.

Can these even be reterminated? It looks molded all the way to the connector itself, so I imagine any bad one just has to be pulled out and scrapped. I don't know why they went with these.