Cat 5 or Cat 6

ChristopherP

ChristopherP

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Ok. Heres the situation:

We have 2meg ADSL now.

We have a 5 metre flat telephone extension lead going from our BT master socket to our Netgear DG814 Modem/4 port swith in the study. We are losing 10db of SNR margin (Signal to Noise) through this extension which is very lossy... and flat extensions don't use twisted wires which is essential for ADSL to run on.

We just won a Netgear FS105 on eBay for £9 and basically would like to have the Modem router in the hall by the master socket, with a network cable (sheilded and lossless) in place of the telephone extension, going to the FS105 switch in the study, which all the computers will be plugged into.

Basically i would like to know which cable would be best for running the modem to the switch... I have heard CAT6 cables will transfer at 1Gb p/s but the other cables are only 10/100... but i have heard that even in such environments a CAT6 would be better?

What do you guys think...

Cat 5
Cat 5e
or
Cat 6

Cheers :)
 
From what I understand to achieve Gigabit speeds you need the cable to have 8 wires (4 pairs) - Cat 5 have only 4 wires ( 2 pairs) and supports transmission frequences up to 100 MHz and is suitable for 10/100 Ethernet.

Cat 5e (Enhanced Cat 5) should have 8 wires and support 10/100/1000 Gigabit Lan.

The Cat 6 standard has to have 8 wires and doubles the Cat 5 bandwidth to 200 MHz and supports 10/100/1000 Gigabit Lan.

The only difference I can see between Cat 5e and Cat 6 is the enhanced bandwidth - not sure what difference that makes.

Obviously you also need to have a 10/100/1000 Gigabit Lan to take advantage of the increased speed.

Thats my limited knowledge of the subject I'm afraid!
 
Hi Chris

Go for the cat 5e, that cable is insulated to cut out radio frequencies.
At the end of the day the network only supports 4 of the wires.:cool:
Hope this has been some use for you?
 
Hey Postill,

The cables will only go at 1GB/s if you have a gigabit router, wont go higher than the ports can handle, say if one port was 1GB and the other 100MB it would run at the slower speed, as they both need to match the speeds.

I would recommend cat5e for the meantime until there is a need for cat6, i use cat5e and it suits the house fine, no loss of data, perfect connections all the time, also another little fact,

CrossOver = pc to pc
Patch = pc to router and vice versa

HTH,

Chris.
 
The cables will only go at 1GB/s if you have a gigabit router, wont go higher than the ports can handle, say if one port was 1GB and the other 100MB it would run at the slower speed, as they both need to match the speeds.
Click to expand...
Yeah...i know that bit! Basically what i was asking was if there is any advantage of using a CAT6 cable to a CAT5 cable on a 10/100 network...

I would recommend cat5e for the meantime until there is a need for cat6, i use cat5e and it suits the house fine, no loss of data, perfect connections all the time, also another little fact,

CrossOver = pc to pc
Patch = pc to router and vice versa
Click to expand...
Yeah...but most routers/hubs/switches couldn't care less what cable you fed them...

HTH,

Chris.
Click to expand...
 
UTP means unsheilded twisted pair... is this different to the entire cables being sheilded from radio waves?
 
Bought a 10m CAT5 "Fastcat" thing - a special STP Sheilded version from novatech.co.uk - faster than CAT5 standard aparently...

Dad is going to pick that up when its ready for collection as he works in portsmouth so we don't have to pay shipping :)
 
Good choice ! - bought alot of stuff from Novatech - there service is excellent...
 
:) i don't usually use them as can usually get stuff cheaper else where but as they are based in cosham which is just down the road from where me dad works, and they sell STP cables which aren't as common as UTP cables, we thought we'd use them... :)
 
Hey Postil,

How's your network going :) Good?

( BTW - Why aren't you at college? Only like 5 people went to ICT )

Chris
 
Cat5/ Cat6 Saga

Just thought you may like to know that I have found Gigalan will not work at correct speed unless you use cat6 sockets. I am using cat6 cable.

Tried it first with cat5 sockets but could only get 100Mb speed. soon as I changed the sockets the speed indicated on test was 1000Mb.

For the cost difference u might as well use cat6 cable.
 
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