Will I see any degradation using really long Ethernet cables?

[Stg-Flame]

Currently have Xfinity's Blast Plus package and I need to run a 100+ft Ethernet cable across my house. Will I see any noticeable speed loss or does the length of the cable not affect the speed? This is probably something that's common knowledge, but I was told one thing a long time ago and never thought about it until now and I'd like to know if the cable will suffice or if I need to rearrange where my systems reside.

I'll be connecting my laptop and maybe my girlfriend's game consoles to the Ethernet cable which she wants to use for gaming.

 

[VirtualLarry]

I'm not sure about Gigabit, but for regular ethernet, I believe that the maximum span between repeaters is 300m or 330m or so. So 100ft should be a go, I think.

Ethernet is not like DSL, it does not "degrade speed", at least as far as the line rate goes. It may lose effective throughput, because if packets get mangled during transit, they get re-transmitted in the case of TCP packets. UDP packet mangling is application-dependent.

IOW, ethernet will start to fail to maintain a proper connection, rather than degrade speed, if there is too much interference, or if the cable run is too long. You can always put a signal repeater (switch), in-between, and use two shorter cables. But I think a 100ft run is still within spec.

 

[dave_the_nerd]

nope, no problem.

 

[Stg-Flame]

Thanks for the responses.

 

[JoeBleed]

Standard gigabit ethernet spec is 100 meter run. 320 ish feet. out of spec, i've been forced to use one 450 ish foot run because they refused to hold the contractor responsible for their laziness. And yes, it actually works at full 1 Gbs. I've seen worse when we were 10 Mb/s hub network when i first started working here. It's not to spec and probably only works because of lack of noise in the environment, path it was ran, specs are for worst case scenarios, who knows.

This is on cat5 and cat5e cable. for latency, file transfer rate, and such you will not notice anything.