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hcker2000
November 8th, 2005, 05:37 AM
I just bought a house and am going to be runing ethernet to 3 rooms. I don't currently have 1000mbps networking but am planing on it in the near future. I'm wondering if cat6 is realy needed over cat5 or cat5e. Longest span of cable would be at most 100 feet.

If I need the cat6 I will spend the extra money but if not then I could save some cash.

banadushi
November 8th, 2005, 05:46 AM
I just bought a house and am going to be runing ethernet to 3 rooms. I don't currently have 1000mbps networking but am planing on it in the near future. I'm wondering if cat6 is realy needed over cat5 or cat5e. Longest span of cable would be at most 100 feet.

If I need the cat6 I will spend the extra money but if not then I could save some cash.

Well since your max span is ~30m you should be fine with cat5e. But if you are constantly saturating the links, you'll get better performance on the longer runs with cat6 due to attenuation and the like.

I'd go for cat5e and just run it at 100mb, don't waste the money on gigE.

hcker2000
November 8th, 2005, 07:43 AM
I'v found several articles on the net about cat5e and it says its good for 100m at gigabit speed so that solves that problem.

WildTangent
November 8th, 2005, 02:31 PM
I would run CAT6, so that you will be somewhat "future-proof" no sense taking all the time to run cable through your house, and then discovering its not good enough for whatever it is they come out with in a few years. I think the extra money will be well spent.

-Wild

Buffalo Soldier
November 8th, 2005, 02:59 PM
Maybe this article can provide some additional info. But the article is dated 01/29/03, I'm not sure whether things are still the same right now.

http://www.tomsnetworking.com/Sections-article41-page4.php


One thing you shouldn't buy into, however, is any recommendation that tells you to use CAT6 for a gigabit Ethernet installation. CAT6 was added to the TIA-568 standard in June 2002 and has a 200MHz bandwidth. Despite the fact that vendors would love to sell you their pricier CAT6 wares, you should only consider it if you're going to be running 10Gigabit Ethernet over copper, which frankly any small networker is going to be extremely unlikely to do! And pitches for CAT7 cable? Fuggedaboutit!

Mr. Electric Wizard
November 8th, 2005, 04:28 PM
I am running a Gigabit network at my house, and used regular old Cat5.
I can run a large file between two very old computers with slow hard drives at 125 megabit.
I assume the bottleneck is the read/write of my ancient hard drives at this point.
I am overall very happy with the performance.

Much happier than with the wireless flock. :p

Mr. Electric Wizard
November 8th, 2005, 04:29 PM
That TomsNetworking article is the one that pushed me towards Cat5 instead of the "future proof" stuff...

hcker2000
November 9th, 2005, 05:30 AM
Yea I think with the short length that I'm going to be runing the wire I will go with cat5e. If I was going for future proof I would ran cat7 for 10gigabit networking but that would be extream.

Gigabit should be plenty for transfering large files.

The other reason I won't be going with cat6 is the fact that every place around here were I can get 500' of cat5e or 6 over charges compared to the net but I need to get this set up today. I'm planing on just geting a role of cat5e and using it for lan and runing another set of it for phone line.

The joys of owning a house lol.

Mr. Electric Wizard
November 9th, 2005, 03:00 PM
Yeah, owning a house is great!
I love the fact that if you own your own house (especially an old one), and can retrofit all kinds of cool stuff into it that runs "behind the scenes".
A buddy told me that he just bought a brand new house and it was fitted with Cat5. I told him, yeah my house it 40 years old and is fitted with Cat5 too!
What I really can't wait to do is put a Network drop in my garage, then I'll be able to pull my VW Bus into the garage and load up my Xbox (mounted in my bus) with music and movies from my file server in my coat closet... ;)

mike998
November 9th, 2005, 04:07 PM
Future proof your house. Go for CAT 6.

hcker2000
November 12th, 2005, 11:42 AM
All done. That was one muddy freaking job.

We ran cat5e as that was all the was available localy and it had to be done this week. 1000' at lowes was $60 which wasnt as bad as I thought it would be. If you buy it by the foot 300' costs over what 1000' box costs so box is the way to go if you need alot.

Mr. Electric Wizard
November 12th, 2005, 02:07 PM
Cool.
I bet that feels good to be done with!
You know Lowes' also sells the "Pass & Seymour Legrand" Modular wall plates too...
Makes a pretty clean install if you need to put lots of different kinds of outlets on your wall plates.