CAT5e vs. CAT6 in business office rewire with no conduit?

[MysticLlama]

Hey guys,

I've been following CAT5e vs. CAT6 discussions all over for a while now, but I'm still not sure if 6 will help any in my situation or if it's a moot point.

The building as it is now is wired with CAT5, but the termination point has to be moved about 40-50' and there is not enough cabling slack to do something like that. Because of this, we're going to be re-pulling all of the wiring in the building to the server room.

This won't be too terribly difficult because most of the offices are wired already, and I can run a line from the server room to the point of termination right now easy enough, so from there I'll wrap the wires together and pull through from the office side. A long process, but not too extremely difficult.

Here's where the problem comes in. The wiring goes to all of the offices, but it's just scattered here and there throughout the ceiling without any rhyme or reason to routing. Because of this wires could cross each other, run next to power or lighting, I have no way to tell.

I know that CAT6 helps with crosstalk between pairs, but would it also help in crosstalk between cables around them?

Or, is this just not a big enough deal to worry about?

I'd imagine that all of the desktops will be 100-TX for a long time to come, so I only need it to run well at that speed vs. 1000.

I will try to bundle groups of wires headed to groups of offices the best I can, but there are some locations that there is zero access to for at least 30+' of the run.

 

[spidey07]

Crosstalk between wires is a non issue. But the bigger concern is why on god's green earth is the termination panel/block being moved.

🙂

 

[Oaf357]

Data and power don't mix. If CAT5e is working for you now then I would just replace it with CAT5e. If a few offices have problems, make sure they're not running near lights.

CAT6 (as far as I know) is just as susceptible to interference from power sources as CAT5e is.

 

[Fallen Kell]

Actually CAT6 is MORE suceptable to environmental issues in reguards to getting full perfomance out of the wire. You will need to worry about the bend ratius for all curves that the cable will need to make. You will also have to worry more about kinks in the cable. Patch connectors will also probably need to be replaced if your patch pannels are a year or two old as they will not be up to spec.

You will need to have professional installers come in to really do this job, and they will need to redo just about everything in the area that uses the CAT6. If, however, you use CAT5e, you will be able to just pull the cable right through the same routing that your existing CAT5 cables use. You will also still be able to use the same patch pannels and connections of the existing CAT5 cables. Unless you have an absolute business need for a 10 gigabit connection, CAT5e is more then enough.

 

[MysticLlama]

Well, here is why it's being moved...

When I got here there were two 10BT hubs, a 16 port and a 24 port, stuck up in a ceiling, with all of the cabling terminated and plugged in right there.

This of course led to a nasty network, certain people would get kicked off around 3ish every day (when one of them would overheat), performance was terrible, etc. etc.

So what we did as an interim solution was pulled all of the cabled into the corner of the conference room, most of them reached except for about 3 we re-pulled. Then we installed a shelf in the corner of the room and put in a couple 24 port switches.

All-in-all it's much better than it was, and I had bigger problems to deal with at the time.

The mail server was in another conference room in a corner with the root password on a post it note on the top of it, the database and ERP servers were sitting in between a bunch of cubes in the accounting department, the warehouse was using a hub/com port replicator all in one thing, and so on and so forth.

Now I have 12 servers in a rack in a dedicated server room, 5 network devices in here (A switch, a couple routers, firewall), a new UPS, and a couple of lines that tie the stuff in here to the rest of the world at the top of the conference room.

I'm now getting ready to install a new rack (the old one was a $100 special that nothing will bolt into without massive effort) and I want to install a separate mini rack beside of it to hold patch panels, switches, the network equipment, etc.

Since the wires are all hanging out in the conference room right now, I can't get them to extend all the way to here.

That's why I'm moving it all.

Also, I have to buy patch panels and such for the first time in this building so I don't have any legacy stuff to reuse.

And the paths to the offices aren't really that bad as far as getting around obstacles, it's mainly a straght shot from where they are now to all the offices, so I'll probably go with the drag new wire to there, then from there to each office plan.

There also aren't too many lights to worry about as far as I know, I just wondered if one would be better than the other.

Now as a separate question? Is there a major difference between the quality of patch panels, or does it mainly come down to how much of a pain they are to work with during installation?

 

[ScottMac]

Fallen Kell: ANY Category rated cable (3--> 6) have the same pulling and installation rules. Minimum bend radius, distance, pulling tension (according to Mfr, but usually in the same neighborhood ~14 lbs), all the same.

Cat 6 is better cable than Cat5e, generally speaking. It has better specifications all the way around - including noise / crosstalk, ACR, power sum specs, etc ... and, as is the case with ALL Category-rated cabling, you SHOULD NOT mix Category ratings between components, it can FUBAR the characteristics of the media/connectors/inserts/panels, etc. The cabling itself is not much more expensive then 5/5e, but the other components are probably ~50% more. Depending on the number of runs, that number may or may not be significant.

If you decide to go with Cat 5, then EVERYTHING should be Cat5, if you decide on Cat 6 then EVERYTHING (cable, connectors, panels, inserts, Jumper / Patch cables, *EVERYTHING* should be Cat 6.

LLama: Depending on the spread of the office, maybe you'd be interested in using some "interduct" type conduit. It looks like a vacuum cleaner hose (corrugated plastic/composite tube). It's not plenum rated (though they might have some that is, I've never looked that deep), but it works well for guiding cable, and can be terminated at standard boxes. In the great scheme of things, it's not that expensive, and gives you a way to easily change or expand your cable plant in the future.


Edit: Regarding quality of one vendor vis another: If it meets and is certified to a specification level, then it should (at least) meet that level. The advantage (if you want to call it that) of the premium vendors (Avaya/formerly Lucent, Ortronics etc) is that they typicaly perform ABOVE the rating, sometime by a significant amount. That extra "headroom" means that any adverse conditions (a minor kink, excessive bend radius, slightly flakey termination, etc) on a given run may still fall into an acceptable Category specification. This is also a good reason to go with Cat 6: the conductors in Cat6 are held in place by an "X" member ... so that even if the cable is bent severely, the pair-to-pair spacing remains relatively constant, giving you a better chance of maintaining spec.

JM.02 / FWIW

Scott

 

[Garion]

Actually, I don't really know if you need to re-run the cables. You can get some very nice-looking wall-mounted racks or cabinets that you could put all your gear in and just leave the panel in the conference room. Yeah, it's a pain, but it will save you some serious bucks. There is no real reason why you need to have your cabling terminate in the server room. In fact, in most big offices, there's a separate wiring closet a ways away from the data center. Leave your switches in the conference room, run some Cat5 cables back to the server room (gig, if you want to get fancy) and call it good.

In other words.. Don't fix it if it's not broken. Work with what you've got, unless you've got cash to burn. If you *do* have problems that seem to be cable-related, get someone to come in and re-wire them for you. Might as well run them back to the computer room if you're going to do it fresh, however.

- G

 

[MysticLlama]

Yeah, I like the "not broke don't fix it" attitude too, but the problem I run into there is that they want the noise out of the conference room. It's so silent in there that the switches are actually quite loud. I suppose we could build a cabinet or something for them and that wouldn't be too bad.

Another problem is that there isn't enough cabling there to truly support the building, there are 3 other switches scattered around to places there was only one termination point, like in the middle of a bunch of cubes, three offices in a corner sharing one line, etc.

Another thing is that I have to re-pull two links from this building to the warehouse (probably going to switch to fiber if I can, because it's pushing distance right now.

The topology is so screwed up that from one of the cubes upstairs you have to go out the little switch, down to the switch stack, into the server room and through two more switches, a firewall, then a router to get to the net. From the Internet offices in the other building, they have to go through the two in that building (distance won't let the far one be directly connected), then one in the conference room, then to the server room.

It's a big mess considering we only have about 40 workstations. 🙂

I'll check into the different types of cabling, and see what the supporting pieces cost, that could definately push it a little bit. It won't be happening in full until after June (new fiscal year/budget), but I need to do the budget planning starting now and I wanted to have my part time guy slowly start replacing some of the cables while things have been slow.

I'm starting to lean towards the idea of good quality CAT5e stuff vs. cheap CAT6 stuff. If it gives the little more headroom then it's safer, and I like to do things only once if at all possible until an upgrade is needed due to performance or some other factor.

The entire project is going to consist of replacing all of the switches and everything as well, but I haven't quite decided on that yet. I really wanted a gigabit backbone for all of the servers, but that would mean not going all Cisco, which I wanted to do for consistency, and because that's what I'm somewhat familiar with and am studying up on.

Another thought.... how nasty would it be if I chopped the ends off of all those cables up there and put them in a patch panel, then jumped it to another patch panel that was wired to in here as a temporary solution? That way I could get the noisy switches out of there, and I wouldn't have to deal with heat so I could just totally cover the things up, and then just disconnect each one as I do a full fresh pull for it.