Networking → Re: Cat5e vs Cat6 for home network?

Like many people have already said, Cat5e is easier to work with. Plus the terminations are cheaper to buy.

You could just get Cat6 cable and then buy Cat5e jacks to terminate on. Then as long as the runs are shorter than 50 meters and if you ever need more than 1 gig speeds, you can replace the jacks at a later date when cat6 parts are cheaper then you're all set without running new cable.

But if you need faster than 1 gig speeds now, you need cat6a cable which is quite expensive. you'll be future proof for at least a decade (educated guess). You'll also need 10 gig switches which are expensive also. Plus 10 gig network cards.

Cat7 isn't finalized but I think it's going to be just like cat6a cable but with shielding on each wire which will be crazy hard to work with. And of course rumors are it can achieve 20 gig to 50 gig speeds over copper... which 99.9% of any households in the world really doesn't need. Business ... maybe. But for home use.. not a chance.

I ran cat5e cable in my home and I'm not even capping it out with all gigabit network cards and switches. Doing a file transfer from one computer to another I don't even see the network go over 50% usage thanks to Windows slowing it down.

Thanks!

I think I'm going to stick with Cat5e. My house is a single story so I'll be running the cables in the basement and fishing them up into the walls. It's easy to access and I don't think I'm going to need any conduit now. For a home network should I buy shielded or unshielded? I really don't care if its more difficult to terminate because once its done I shouldn't have to worry about it. An electrician/network friend of ours is going to be helping me with it. He's done lots of commercial work as well as residential network jobs.

Edit: Which brand/manufacturers should I go with? I don't want to buy cheap copper clad aluminum stuff. I'd rather get something that's of high quality that will last, than something cheap I may have to replace within a few years.

You dont need shielding unless you are running cable parallel to 220v which you should not do even if they were shielded.

Shielded cable is there just to make more money on. The industry pushes out fear in lost packets so they can make more money. Just like Jiffy Lube pushes fear in people if they go over 3000 miles for an oil change. My car goes 7500 miles between changes according to the car manual specs but the oil change industry tries to push fear into people that they must change their oil at 3000 or suffer engine damage. They just want more money which is the real case.

I think that is a good decision. Cat5e supports up to 1Gig, and there is effort underway within IEEE to push that somewhat higher. For a home LAN hard to imagine any drop needing more than Gig Ethernet any time in the reasonable future.

Shielded cable is gross overkill for a home environment and very difficult to ground effectively.

Run all the cable to a central location so the entire house can be serviced by a single Ethernet switch. If at some point need to bump speed to an internal web/media server all you need to do is get a switch with a 10G port and an 10G media server. Each drop will still be limited to Gig but the composite to the media server now becomes 10G. One can hope for Gig+ ISP service but I would not hold my breath waiting for it to happen.

/tom