During cable dressing an interconnect gets routed around a sharp rack-post corner and cinched tight with a zip tie pressed against the connector boot. Which cabling principle is at risk here?

Interconnect cables carry published handling limits: a minimum bend radius, a maximum tie-down force, and guidance against loading the connector boot. Bending a cable around a sharp post corner does two things at once — the jacket compresses on the inside of the bend while the conductors or fibers stretch on the outside, shifting the electrical geometry the cable was designed around — while a tight tie on the boot presses axially on the connector body, which can walk it out of its socket or stress the latch. Both defects produce intermittent errors: renegotiated links, sporadic checksum failures, and a shelf that drops under load and returns at idle. Correct dressing routes cables along managers, keeps bends to a hand-fitting curve, and places ties on the jacket away from boots with light tension. Color-coding and label visibility are genuine installation standards but are not the principle being violated; the signal-direction reversal around a post is invented — direction follows ports and topology, not geometry. Exam caveat: bend radius appears in dressing questions and in troubleshooting ones; tight around sharp edges is always the wrong answer. Operational check: trace each dressed run by hand — no sharp-corner contact, no zip-tie deformation of the jacket, boots free of load.