Which Cat To Use?
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I’m wondering something. Y’see, for several years now in keeping our little home LAN running I’ve been using Cat5e cables to link everything together. Recently, as part of my never ending effort to keep from falling behind on things technical, I find that the Cat5e cables that I’ve been using for so long are no longer the standard and haven’t been for quite a while now. Apparently, somebody changed the standard to CAT6 without checking with me first.
Ok, I don’t suppose they really <grin> needed to check with me but I have to say that while I’m nowhere close to the most technically current, it IS embarrassing to discover that something I thought was a current standard has apparently been out of date since not very long after I adopted the use of it myself.
Now it leaves me with a question. Do I go ahead and continue using the Cat5e cables I’m using until there’s a bigger need to replace ‘em or is there any benefit to changing at all?
Technorati Tags: cat5e, cat6, standard, network cable, home lan
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As I recall, Cat5e supports 10/100 fine, so unless you have some gigabit network hardware somewhere and you really need the extra speed, 5e will probably be fine for the near future.
Thanks for the clue.
Gigabit?!? Yeah I WISH I had gigabit hardware! Then again, I don’t know whether my ISP offers speeds high enough to need gigabit capacities.
I wouldn’t be worried about that, you’d be hard pressed to find and isp that can even push your 100 fast ethernet unless you’ve got fiber to your house. even comcast DOCSIS 2 will only send up to 38 Mbit/s. (however there new DOCSYS 3, when realeased should be 150+) The only reason you would need higher speeds is for interaction between nodes on the network. For instance if you wanted to stream video from a central server to a client pc or if you wanted super high speed file transfer between computers.
Well I guess I’ve nothing to worry about, the most intense thing I do is running freenet
well it depends if you used cat 5 or cat 5e, which is differant, cat 5 supports 10/100, cat 5e and cat 6 support 10/100/1000 (1000 also referred to as gigabit ethernet) cat 6 is just better cabling with more shielding.
So the good news is you can obtain gigabit speeds by purchasing a gigabit router.
but the real question is, is it worth it? do you transfer large files between computers? perform remote backups? for general internet downloading/surfing, there will be no difference.
From previous comments I’d say I’ve nothing to worry about, the cable I have is Cat5e but the hardware will only operate at 10/100. ’sides, I don’t think my ISP is going to be offering gigabit speeds anytime soon.
too bad eh?