Hi,
I'm building a home network in my house and I'm curious as to whether I can/should replace certain cables with cat 6 and see a benefit.
My planned setup is in the attached picture, but basically my modem (with three spare ports) lives in my living room, it is connected to a switch under the stairs. All other rooms would be connected directly to the switch (including a NAS connected directly to the switch with a run of less than a meter).
In the picture all circled numbers will be solid core Cat 5e sent between rooms.
By instinct, I'm not much of an early-adopter, and reading around, I probably tend to the "cat 5e is fine for home networks" side of the debate. Plus I already have a load of good cat 5e to use! However, runs 1 (switch to study) and 2 (switch to living room) in my diagram are the easiest runs to implement, also these rooms will be consuming the most bandwidth by far. So I'm thinking should I could put cat 6 or 6a here. (I'm more concerned by bandwidth to the NAS than to the router/internet)
What do you think? Is there any benefit to such a mixed network? or does Cat 6 have to be all or nothing?
Thanks
P.S The network use is primarily:
- General web browsing
- Working from home (i.e. Remote desktops)
- Streaming HD video from the NAS (no more than well-compressed 1080p - not Bluray quality)
- The occasional big download

I'm building a home network in my house and I'm curious as to whether I can/should replace certain cables with cat 6 and see a benefit.
My planned setup is in the attached picture, but basically my modem (with three spare ports) lives in my living room, it is connected to a switch under the stairs. All other rooms would be connected directly to the switch (including a NAS connected directly to the switch with a run of less than a meter).
In the picture all circled numbers will be solid core Cat 5e sent between rooms.
By instinct, I'm not much of an early-adopter, and reading around, I probably tend to the "cat 5e is fine for home networks" side of the debate. Plus I already have a load of good cat 5e to use! However, runs 1 (switch to study) and 2 (switch to living room) in my diagram are the easiest runs to implement, also these rooms will be consuming the most bandwidth by far. So I'm thinking should I could put cat 6 or 6a here. (I'm more concerned by bandwidth to the NAS than to the router/internet)
What do you think? Is there any benefit to such a mixed network? or does Cat 6 have to be all or nothing?
Thanks
P.S The network use is primarily:
- General web browsing
- Working from home (i.e. Remote desktops)
- Streaming HD video from the NAS (no more than well-compressed 1080p - not Bluray quality)
- The occasional big download
