How much should 30m of cat6 cable cost?

Goose

Goose

Goose

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I'm going to be running a cable from one room in to the next and need about 30 metres of cable to do it. I've found one place selling it £30 and another place selling it £10 and I have no idea the cheap stuff is cheap for a reason.

How much would/should you pay for a metre ethernet cable?
 
bledd. said:
Remember, you shouldn't use RJ45 ends on CAT6, the cable is thicker, you can buy purpose made CAT6 ends,
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You still use RJ45 with CAT6 (and even CAT6a), but they should be specific CAT6 rated ones (They are both easier to work with, due to accepting the thicker cable, but also have different crosstalk characteristics etc).

In reality CAT5 RJ45's work fine with CAT6 cable (and indeed you can use solid cable with RJ45s and Patchpanels/faceplates with stranded)



bledd. said:
but the best option is to use back boxes and modules.
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I think you mean with Solid cable rather than Stranded.


bledd. said:
Is cat5e not up to the task?, it's thinner and easier to work with.
Click to expand...

No arguments there :)
 
Goose said:
I'm going to be running a cable from one room in to the next and need about 30 metres of cable to do it. I've found one place selling it £30 and another place selling it £10 and I have no idea the cheap stuff is cheap for a reason.

How much would/should you pay for a metre ethernet cable?
Click to expand...

Another thing to note is to avoid cables marked as CCA they are copper clad aluminium not solid copper and are often much cheaper but not acceptable under the relevant standards for CAT6 like IEC.
 
Hobbsie said:
isnt the length with cat5e an issue with gigabit speed? id allways opt for cat6.
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Cat5e is fine for gigabit. I'd opt for Cat6 where I could, as well, but the problem is that it's much less flexible and harder to negotiate round corners, which means the Cat5e can be easier to use.
 
BTW, when i buy this cable i'll also be buying this switch unless there's a compelling reason not to?

Cable will be going from router > switch > TV, FireTV, NAS.
 
Whilst I agree that *some* cables are shoddy, I don't think that it's nearly as prevalent as the links earlier in the thread try to make out.

You'll note that both of the links are by the same people, Blue Jeans Cable, who have an interest in selling you cables :P
Whilst they provide a testing method with at least a semblance of reasonableness, they don't identify the cables they've actually tested, or anything other than a set of test results without enough data to actually make a reasonable judgement.

This is my take on it:
Assuming you buy a cable from a decent brand (Not Belkin), which isn't CCA, and that you visually check the terminations on the ends are decent, then you'll be just fine.
Buying the local supermarket/ office store's own brand cable is probably going to be CCA with the cheapest possible connectors, and parp :P

-Leezer-
 
If you're buying pre-terminated patch cables then they either work or they don't. Unless you go out of your way to buy junk they will almost certainly work.

At one place I found some cat6e cables that were really thin. Obviously cat6e is an imaginary standard so I chopped one up so see what was in it. As best I can tell it was actually CCS (steel) but they did actually work at the lengths involved.

If you're buying solid core for infrastructure cabling then it is worth worrying about it.
 
If you're doing installed cabling then you use a contractor who can provide you with a full test report of all the drops that they install before you sign the job off. At which point they can't use crap cable because it won't pass the tests.

You don't have to deal with this sort of stuff for very long before you get a good idea of what brands are and are not quality cable, what prices should be around etc.
 
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