Broadband Tech > Networking > Netwrok cable for gigabit router

Netwrok cable for gigabit router

You only need an unshielded CAT5E cable to do gigabit. Even then, don't expect this to speed up your Internet connection.

reply to Sammmy00
Gigabit was designed for regular CAT5 cable.

On long runs it was found that CAt5e was needed so the spec was updated.

Shielded CAT6 is way overkill, especially for a short run.

What kind of speed test results are you seeing? Are they near what your ISP is providing?
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Scott Henion

Embedded Systems Consultant,
SHDesigns home - DIY Welder

reply to Sammmy00
Have your folks buy you a cable from Monoprice and save 90%. Here are their shielded CAT6 - you can get 100 feet and still have money left over from what Best Buy wants.
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reply to Sammmy00
When I installed the new HD quality cable at my house for , the installer went around the house changing many of the existing end plugs as they were not done well and introduced noise into the system (yes I had done most of them myself). If you are having any issues I highly recomomend a technician check all your coax plugs/ends to ensure they are properly shielded and inserted. Also If your house is not wired for etherent using cat5e you may not get the highest lan speeds (but should not affect much lower WAN connections. In general problems occur at connection points and at the connectors for both coax and rj 45.. Concur there are many cheaper places to get any kind of wiring. Locally I got to places that the installler companies go for equipment (like a Harris and Roome) and pay cash and get stuff locally for much cheaper and reasonable quality. (a thought if on-line purchases are not possible),
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LlamaWorks Equipment

reply to Sammmy00
what kind of internet connection do you have, and what speed package are you on? (I'm assuming that you're talking about speeds from your computer out to the internet, and not computer to computer)

reply to Sammmy00
The gigabit router creates a gigabit scope on your LAN, inside your house, only. So if you want to demonstrate the speeds you have to perform a test from one LAN machine to another, for example by FTPing a large file from one local machine to another. The whole benefit of the gigabit is to facilitate very high speed network transfers between local hosts, typically in situations such as streaming video from network attached storage to a media frontend, or network mounted filesystems.

Doing a speed test from the WAN (the internet) like you did is testing the wrong thing. You are testing your WAN speed, which is capped by your service provider. You'll reach your provisioned speed long before you approach anywhere near the limits of the gigabit switch. Rig a test internally to your LAN instead.
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Scott Brown Consulting

reply to Sammmy00

It's a RIP off

Actually, 10G(BASE-T) uses CAT6A and CAT6 as well. We run it in our lab between the ASR9000's and the CRS3.

»www.google.com/products/catalog?···IQ8wIwAw

»en.wikipedia.org/wiki/10_Gigabit_Ethernet

That being said, 10GBE is still not practical or economical for the home or even small business at this point.

You are right. Apparently now there is a 10GBaseT standard which may use copper with a recommendation of Cat6A or Cat6 for very short distances (after the re-qualification of cabling to support).

I have not seen anything like that actually in use anywhere. Almost all deployments use fiber for 10Gig Ethernet. All NICs I have seen do support optical only. There are very expensive equipment anyway so there is no point try to skimp over fibre cables to save a few bucks. You are likely to get into more trouble with use of copper cabling.

reply to sbconslt

Re: Netwrok cable for gigabit router

OK, I just did the transfer twice and both it took about the same time (plus or minus 13 seconds) for the 10/100 and the 10/1000. The file was 121 MB. One thing though is that my Windows XP laptop is on wireless, does this matter? I got a 802.11n card for it and I made sure it was working so I think that should be fast enough but I could be wrong. Thanks.

Do it from wired client to wired client otherwise you are once again convolving two separate tests (the wired switch's speed convolved with the wireless transcievers' speed).

A common test could be to install an FTP server (FileZilla server for instance) on one host and do an ftp get of a large file from another host using Windows' built-in command line ftp, that should report you the throughput when it completes. I would avoid using Windows File Sharing (Samba) transfers because the overhead involved will distort the result. FTP is more appropriate.
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Scott Brown Consulting

reply to Sammmy00

reply to Sammmy00

reply to DrTCP
DrTCP makes a good point. Your wired ethernet ports involved need to be backed by gigabit controllers otherwise you won't exceed fast ethernet (100mbps) speeds.

reply to DrTCP