cat5e or cat6?

[KermitM42]

not sure of the difference.
ive been told that they both do gigabit but cat6 is rated for outdoors.
any truth to that? if not what is the difference

 

[p0lar]

Originally posted by: KermitM42
not sure of the difference.
ive been told that they both do gigabit but cat6 is rated for outdoors.
any truth to that? if not what is the difference

Both carry gigabit with ease and have outdoor-rated variants.

Cat6 is just an agreed standard that increases the available bandwidth from 100MHz to 200 MHz (or 250 MHz?) for cat6. Though you can purchase cat5e as far as 350MHz (or more?), you don't really have any guarantees that it will meet such specifications under all conditions. The bottom line is that cat6 is a newer standard based upon higher specifications that improves overall signal:noise ratios. Whenever you improve the signal:noise ratios, you can effectively increase the performance ceiling by reducing risk of line error. For more in-depth information on this, you can google things like insertion loss, return loss, ELFEXT, and NEXT.

The real detriment to installing a fully-certified cat6 network are the connecting points, tooling and testing equipment required to maintain proper signal:noise ratios, not the cabling itself. Also, worth a mention, is the expense of the cat6 terminations as the cable is only a moderate increase in cost.

 

[skyking]

With the improved singal/noise ratio p0lar described, CAT6 can carry 10GbE speeds for up to 55 meters.
CAT6A will go the full 100 meters with 10GbE. Once again, the termination, testing and certification requirements to fully appreciate this performance are not cheap.
I personally recommend installing the best wire available when the walls are open, using the industry standards for routing, bend radius, support. It is a bear to come back and drag in better copper later.

 

[spidey07]

Originally posted by: skyking
With the improved singal/noise ratio p0lar described, CAT6 can carry 10GbE speeds for up to 55 meters.
CAT6A will go the full 100 meters with 10GbE. Once again, the termination, testing and certification requirements to fully appreciate this performance are not cheap.
I personally recommend installing the best wire available when the walls are open, using the industry standards for routing, bend radius, support. It is a bear to come back and drag in better copper later.

The goal of the 10gig working group is 100 meters over cat6. We'll see if they can get it done.

In this day and age cat5e is dead for LAN applications IMHO. The price difference between the two is almost non-existent.

That being said I'd say that a good 40% of category 5 rated cable installs do NOT pass category 5 tests. Cat6/6a just makes it that much more difficult to pass.

As far as outdoors, tell whoever told you that to go smoke some more crack. If it's a friend of yours then ridicule him for 2 years for being so stupid.

 

[p0lar]

Originally posted by: spidey07
As far as outdoors, tell whoever told you that to go smoke some more crack. If it's a friend of yours then ridicule him for 2 years for being so stupid.

Minimum.

 

[Kevin]

Is Cat6 completely backwards compliant with Cat5/5e? I need to do a ~30ft run and my buddy gave me a spool of Cat6 cable that he had. Am I going to run into problems if I use this cable?

 

[JackMDS]

Compatibilty is Not a problem.