Effectiveness of a Faraday cage grounded or not against external RF I was discussing high-quality twisted pair cables that go from a DSL modem to a wallsocket and have an overall shield.
A friend has pointed out that shielded cables ought to have the shield connected to earth. My understanding of this point is that it prevents the local potential inside the Faraday cage possibly bouncing up and down relative to the outside environment. Is this an accurate interpretation? I am wondering how much benefit you get anyway in an un-grounded setup, in this case where the conductors inside are a twisted pair. Since the inside of the shield is a faraday cage the potential is flat and the electric field is zero i.e. grad V = E = 0 everywhere so this surely makes life say for the twisted pair. Maybe the charge redistribution response time of the shield is inadequate or it has internal resistance so that the interior is not an effective Faraday cage up to sufficiently high frequencies. (Superconducting shields are out of my price bracket.)
 A: You ground these because Faraday cages are not perfect.  One near field effect which matters in this case is capacitive coupling between the shield and the wires.  If the shield is ungrounded, it's effectively an antenna, and thus acts as coupled antenna to your wires.  Grounding the shielding fixes the antenna like effect.
In theory you could also resolve this issue with an ungrounded shield that is further away from the wires, but that takes up more space.
Of course, you have to be careful.  If you ground it on both sides, you get a ground loop, which can cause all sorts of problems for some analog hardware.
A: Grounding a Faraday cage creates a new current path by induction.  The longer the wires connected to the ground, (all the wires,) the more induction is likely. Better to use multiple layers of faraday insulators. One in side the other each one insulated from the others. Wires out side the box are conductors and defeat the purpose.  A farady cage with external wires is not effective.
