RB960PGS with POE burns in lightning

RouterOS General
1

Hello.
I have a problem you may have encountered.
I have an internet network in several villages.
The network is built like this:
An antenna into the village and inside the village there are RB960PGS connected to each other on cat5e cable, synchronized on 1 GB routers working on POE.
This network works great all year except for lightning storms in the winter season.
Every winter, I am completely devastated by routers.
I put high quality lightning shields on the power source for all the routers and it didn’t help.
Usually the damage to the routers is mainly to the routers that issue POE, the last router in each line is usually not damaged, when a router is damaged I see a router that causes POE to overload or short.
Does anyone have an idea how to overcome it?
It costs me a lot of dollars every year ..
I thought maybe put RBGPOE in front of each router and split it to pass the power on and then maybe they won’t ruin because the POE won’t be on.

That problem for you too?

Thanks so much to the assistants ..

2

Lightning strikes, even if not really near, can cause considerable voltage inducted in any metallic cable. Which includes cat5e cables if those are not laid inside some steel-reinforced concrete which would shield them (think of Faraday cage). The other problem is that earth potential can differ a lot when lightning strikes near by.

All in all: you’ll have to deal with surge protection on those ethernet cables. Proper installations would use shielded UTP cables, with shield grounded on one end only. And then surge arresters mounted on all cable ends. However, PoE might still have problems when surge arresters trip (they do it by shorting “problematic” wire to the ground which might cause short also on PoE …).