What's the point of Cat6 if it only does 1gig like Cat5e?

[spidey07]

I doubt it. Maybe after 5 years, but not in 1-3 years.

Why? Because there isn't really much need for it. Even HD video streaming is easily handled by 100 Base-T, and Gigabit is fine for most other consumers, and will continue to be so for the next three years.

In fact, I suspect in 1-3 years, CAT5e will still be the standard of choice sold at Home Depot, with some people selling CAT6, but few selling CAT6a in high volume to general contractors.

To put it another way... Macs often get faster network technology before everyone else. 5 years later or whatever, everyone else gets it on low end computers.

Higher end Macs have had Gigabit for a very long time now. However, only very recently has Gigabit become common on lower end PCs. Macs have had Gigabit since 2000. This was when the lowly G4 500 MHz was king.

OTOH, not a single Mac supports 10 GigE out-of-the-box. Moreover, I have never seen a single Mac user, even the hardcore video types who buy maxed out Mac Pros, ask for advice on forums like this for 10 GigE. The demand just isn't there.

It's my opinion that you don't understand how the progression has occurred since 1990. It WILL HAPPEN.

 

[alkemyst]

CAT6 is better cable than CAT5e and when 10GbE comes out, CAT5e won't handle that but CAT6 will

Well it's hard to say that in totality.

Many homes and businesses are pushing their lower end cables to higher bandwidths with no problem.

I wouldn't be surprised if some Cat 6 installs fail at higher than 'now' bandwidths due to sloppy installation.

OP: this sums it up http://www.broadbandutopia.com/caandcaco.html

 

[VirtualLarry]

However, only very recently has Gigabit become common on lower end PCs. Macs have had Gigabit since 2000.

I'm still amazed at the fact that the retail crap-box desktop rigs still have 10/100, when nearly all of the mobos sold at newegg are gigabit.

 

[Eug]

It's my opinion that you don't understand how the progression has occurred since 1990. It WILL HAPPEN.

2000: Gigabit network interfaces on higher end consumer machines
2009: Gigabit networks in the home are actually not that uncommon

That progression doesn't seem that fast to me.

Fast forward...

2011: No large volume consumer machines have 10 GigE.

Tell me how 10 GigE networks are going to be common in the home by 2012-2014 again? Yeah, 10 GigE in the home WILL HAPPEN. It just won't be common in 1-3 years from now.

 

[Ross Ridge]

It's my opinion that you don't understand how the progression has occurred since 1990. It WILL HAPPEN.

It never happened without a reason. Right now the average consumer isn't able to get anywhere near the potential bandwith out of 1 Gigabit Ethernet. With default settings TCP/IP, which pretty much networking protocol currently is based on, doesn't scale well to those speeds. You can fix that with various tweaks, but the average consumer hasn't, and doesn't notice the difference. Heck most consumers have 100 Mbit routers and/or do most of their networking over wireless so they can't notice the difference.

Without demand for faster networking speeds no one is going to bother trying to mass produce it for consumers. Sure eventually, consumers will start feeling the limits of gigabit networks, and costs will gradually come down anyways as demand from business widens. Then you'll start seeing 10G Ethernet standard in new dekstop PCs, but that's not a year or two away. Not when today cards cost $400, require 8x PCI-Express slots and cabling that isn't generally available. Five years is a much more realistic time frame to expect 10GBase-T to become "common".

It also possible that it'll never become commonly used by consumers. The whole concept of wired networks in the home could become obsolete. Most consumers these days seem to prefer wireless networking despite all its problems. The only wired Ethernet connection many people have in their homes is that short bit of cable connecting their broadband modem to thier wireless router. That's how progress often goes. Consumers tend to prefer convienence over performance and other technical merits.

 

[spidey07]

And 640 kbytes of ram is enough. Its the way of computing and bandwidth utilization more than doubles every 2 years. It's just the way it is. What we think is unheard of will be common place.

1 gig Ethernet to hosts was considered overkill, now it is a must have and 10 gig is considered overkill, but is a must have. 1080p/60 video conferencing was considered a pipe dream just years ago, now it's reality.

It WILL progress. 1 gig for consumers was considered completely out of the realm of affordability just 5 years ago.

 

[Ross Ridge]

And 640 kbytes of ram is enough. Its the way of computing and bandwidth utilization more than doubles every 2 years. It's just the way it is. What we think is unheard of will be common place.

No, that's way it was. No one thought 640K of RAM was enough. Not even Bill Gates. Back then you bought as much RAM as you could afford. Even if you put as much RAM in your PC as it could possibly take, you still felt restricted. Today you see people asking on these forums whether they should bother upgrading from 4G to 8G, and the answer is usually no.

1 gig Ethernet to hosts was considered overkill, now it is a must have...

No, for most people gigabyte Ethernet is far from a must have. Wireless networking is more important for many people.

It WILL progress. 1 gig for consumers was considered completely out of the realm of affordability just 5 years ago.

Uh, five years ago I could get a 1000Base-T Ethernet card for less than $100, plug it in a PCI socket, and use my existing cabling. Not that I needed to, my then three year old motherboard had it already built in. It's been affordable for a long time now, and consumers still aren't making effective use of it.

Progress doesn't happen for the sake of progress. There needs to be reason.

 

[Cable God]

Please don't tell me you have a $15k switch in your home Cable God...

Nah I'm using it as my standard top-of-rack switch at work.

 

[spidey07]

I'm talking about the networking industry. Home networking is an afterthought to the technology and progress. 10 gig is starting to not be enough for high density VMs.

 

[Eug]

We were talking end users. ie. Home / small business.

 

[Emulex]

10gig requires too much power right now. it runs on cat6 no problemo. but you can't have that much wattage being sucked down for a up to 100m run in a consumer laptop/desktop - not feasible. not sure if they can put a dual ported cat6 10gb card on a x8 slot due to power limitations. might have to plug in to the power supply to feed it more juice. crazy huh

 

[alkemyst]

10gig requires too much power right now. it runs on cat6 no problemo. but you can't have that much wattage being sucked down for a up to 100m run in a consumer laptop/desktop - not feasible. not sure if they can put a dual ported cat6 10gb card on a x8 slot due to power limitations. might have to plug in to the power supply to feed it more juice. crazy huh

Assuming you are looking to upload at 10Gbps.

 

[ComputerWizKid]

My Cat is a CATagory 6E Cat for Enhanced Cuteness :biggrin:

 

[Emulex]

the biggest mistake people make imo - is having mixed bandwidth in their environment. esp with mixed environment. (ahem xp sucks at high bandwidth). nagle/fast start/window size/jumbo. Truth is most people are good with 100 meg on all devices. they upgrade a few devices to gig and their backbone and wonder why bandwidth goes poopie because their gear isn't doing (or is) flow control through the switch/nic/tcp stack properly. this in turn backs up the buffers which causes instability.

in most cases if all of your devices are not fully capable of 10gbps you do not want it.

most people that i know are best off at HOME with 100mbps . gigabit not very likely since they run cheapie switches and low quality wiring. 10 gigabit hardly not at all likely.

i think an expensive install - yeah go for cat6a - save yourself trouble 5 years from now - when you need to run hdmi/dp+gigabit over the same wires (hdbase-T) etc.

please make sure you use a patch panel and dont try to crimp cat6a - it is truly where things get VERY expensive. you can go ghetto on cat5e since it is so overspec'd for its job these days (and mature) but the new hotness comes with new terms right now.

 

[RGUN]

The alternative to Monoprice in Canada by the way (or at least when I rewired our offices about a year ago now) is http://www.infinitecables.com/index.html

The stuff was very reasonably priced, arrived quickly, and everything worked.

I also didnt want to have to make all the connections, so I used all pre made cables.

 

[ScottMac]

the biggest mistake people make imo - is having mixed bandwidth in their environment. esp with mixed environment. (ahem xp sucks at high bandwidth). nagle/fast start/window size/jumbo. Truth is most people are good with 100 meg on all devices. they upgrade a few devices to gig and their backbone and wonder why bandwidth goes poopie because their gear isn't doing (or is) flow control through the switch/nic/tcp stack properly. this in turn backs up the buffers which causes instability.

in most cases if all of your devices are not fully capable of 10gbps you do not want it.

most people that i know are best off at HOME with 100mbps . gigabit not very likely since they run cheapie switches and low quality wiring. 10 gigabit hardly not at all likely.

i think an expensive install - yeah go for cat6a - save yourself trouble 5 years from now - when you need to run hdmi/dp+gigabit over the same wires (hdbase-T) etc.

please make sure you use a patch panel and dont try to crimp cat6a - it is truly where things get VERY expensive. you can go ghetto on cat5e since it is so overspec'd for its job these days (and mature) but the new hotness comes with new terms right now.

IMO, the mistake most SOHO users make is they don't understand cascading bandwidth effects, i.e., pushing three, seven, fifteen, or (gawd forbid) 23 or 31 ports of input with a destination that only has one output port, all of the same bandwidth (input and output).

Many don't seen to understand that a fat pipe on the shared segment(s) - servers and WAN - with lesser bandwidth feeds on the dedicated segments - users - will (USUALLY) give greater effective network utilization and perceived network "speed" (performance) for all users.

Three, five, seven, 15, 23 or 31 ports of GigE input all aimed (primarily) at one port of GigE output is effectively using the switch as a hub and, if there's any reasonable amount of traffic, will crank up the latency and jitter. All-ports-equal works great for many-to-many, but sux deluxe for many-to-one.

 

[Eug]

IMO, the mistake most SOHO users make is they don't understand cascading bandwidth effects, i.e., pushing three, seven, fifteen, or (gawd forbid) 23 or 31 ports of input with a destination that only has one output port, all of the same bandwidth (input and output).

Many don't seen to understand that a fat pipe on the shared segment(s) - servers and WAN - with lesser bandwidth feeds on the dedicated segments - users - will (USUALLY) give greater effective network utilization and perceived network "speed" (performance) for all users.

Three, five, seven, 15, 23 or 31 ports of GigE input all aimed (primarily) at one port of GigE output is effectively using the switch as a hub and, if there's any reasonable amount of traffic, will crank up the latency and jitter. All-ports-equal works great for many-to-many, but sux deluxe for many-to-one.

I will have tons of ports all aimed at one port of GigE output. However, for home use in my case it doesn't matter. I only have one big stream running at once.

ie. Lots and lots of ports in the house, but very low aggregate bandwidth usage. The only other usage is internet access. I suspect many homes function this way.

The alternative to Monoprice in Canada by the way (or at least when I rewired our offices about a year ago now) is http://www.infinitecables.com/index.html

The stuff was very reasonably priced, arrived quickly, and everything worked.

I also didnt want to have to make all the connections, so I used all pre made cables.

Sweet, thx.

However, they don't sell bulk Cat6a either.

most people that i know are best off at HOME with 100mbps . gigabit not very likely since they run cheapie switches and low quality wiring.

Well, cheapie switches are fine for people like me with low usage (see above).

 

[imaheadcase]

Not sure if mentioned. But Cat6 also as longer distances you can run vs cat5e. Granted, not a huge deal for homes, but still something to consider.

btw the future is fiber networks.

 

[Emulex]

flatwire 1mm is a godsend. check it out

 

[1BadBoy]

I'm a short time away from wiring my house with CAT wiring. I'm leaning toward CAT6a. But I see references to sheilded (STP) or unshielded (UTP). I know I need solid wire in the walls, though I have seen some sites with bulk stranded wire.

What is the difference between STP and UTP and which should I install?

 

[alkemyst]

Sheilding is the differece. What application are you looking to serve?

UTP is fine for most household needs, 6a would be a good choice for a new installation.

 

[imagoon]

I'm a short time away from wiring my house with CAT wiring. I'm leaning toward CAT6a. But I see references to sheilded (STP) or unshielded (UTP). I know I need solid wire in the walls, though I have seen some sites with bulk stranded wire.

What is the difference between STP and UTP and which should I install?

You need UTP. Read the sticky for more information.

 

[Fallen Kell]

so why not release Cat6 when it's ready to do 10gig?
and continue using Cat5e till then?

Cat6 WAS released when it was ready to do 10gig. The problem was that 10gig wasn't ready to do 10gig. You do know that the specifications for Cat6 cable were originally made in 2002 right? Cat7 was also designed at the same time. Revisions were made on both back in 2009 (hence the Cat6a, and Cat7a). Cable standards are well ahead of actual communications standards, and always have been. The phone company isn't running 100's of cat1 cables across their phone poles to homes, and never did. Cat1 was for in the home only (except for the very very first phones rolled out). They always used a higher grade cable with multiple twisted pairs, on the poles so they could hook up more than 1 home.

Same thing now. The cable specifications are designed so that more data can go across them, with lower interference, and less cross-talk. There are plenty of applications which require much higher specifications for those two things because they are not using ethernet protocols over the cable, but use something else, like Infiniband.

 

[spikespiegal]

You don't have to start replacing cables in a few years when 10gbps becomes norm.

If we're lucky that will be 2050 for broadband providers. Maybe different if you live in Korea and play a lot of SC2. Can't say much for Japan, other than it's tough to brag about your high speed broadband infrastructure when there's no power.

Over 90% of my corporate clients are still on 100meg infrastructure on the client side and have no intent of changing because there's no productivity improvement going to gig with what most people are running on their desktops. Yes, the CAD guys and multimedia folks want gig....then their HD's can't keep up. The SANs can. Outlook doesn't need 10gig connections.

10 gig is starting to not be enough for high density VMs.

I wasn't aware you connected VMs with an ethernet cable. We don't, because we keep those VM's on the same box.

Next, we just did some VMotion testing with a brand new NetApp box and one gig infrastructure performed seamlessly. Obviously our sales reps wanted to sell us 10gig switches.

Last, the overwhelming data pattern for the entire global technology industry is towards thin computing (VDI), smart phones, iPad type devices, etc. None of which even approach or saturate 10 year old specs. Cell phone towers are getting choked with data, and we're suposed to fix the issue with 10gig cable? Maybe we should go back to token ring....

 

[spidey07]

spikespiegal, I don't know where you're coming from but it's exactly the opposite of what I'm seeing where high density 10 gig ethernet is the norm or moving to it. Typical VM implementations can be in the hundreds of hosts and you need high speed networking between all of them to really take advantage of some of the fault tolerance and vmotion freatures. Also a power host with lots of VMs will absolutely need 10 gig.

Right now data centers are struggling to keep up with the demand for 10 gig which is where the top of rack or end of row switches come into play.

If the trend is to keep all the computing centralized then one must have a high speed network to accomplish that. 1 gig just isn't enough anymore. For small installations it may do, but move just a few loaded ESX hosts or blade enclosures and you're going to need 10g to really take advantage.

But to the topic, 10 gig in the data center is still twinax or fiber.