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The Official Home Networking FAQ is great, but one area it differs from many responses on this forum is the speed of network cabling to use.
The FAQ says:
A majority of replies on this forum say "Install Cat 6 to future-proof". So can we make this guidance more concrete: in what situations is Cat 5e not enough?
I'm about to wire up my house and was going to go Cat 5e because because it's easier to terminate and route. Most tasks I do (backup over network, access NAS) are limited by drive speed rather than the network (I'm not backing up TBs to SSDs yet). But in a decade..?
Media is potentially the only reason I see to go faster; move that noisy Blueray player from beside the TV and put it in another room, and stream over the network.
The FAQ says:
Category 5e – Providing up-to 1G (2.5G in future) connections at a max channel length of 100M this is the lowest grade on my list, but, this is sufficient for 99% of applications, it is the cheapest, easiest to install and will provide you with suitable bandwidth for many years to come.
Category 6 – The bigger brother to Category 5e is Category 6, it has a larger conductor size, this is the actual metallic conductor in the cable, it also has a plastic divider which divides each pair from each other in-turn reducing cross-talk. In simple terms, this means it's thicker but is better at carrying Power over Ethernet (PoE) and can carry higher bandwidth applications.
Category 6A – The last cable I'll mention will offer up-to 10G bandwidth, however this cable is extremely overkill in the average home and if you are installing this throughout it is going to cause many headaches due to it's larger cable size and more difficult termination.
A majority of replies on this forum say "Install Cat 6 to future-proof". So can we make this guidance more concrete: in what situations is Cat 5e not enough?
I'm about to wire up my house and was going to go Cat 5e because because it's easier to terminate and route. Most tasks I do (backup over network, access NAS) are limited by drive speed rather than the network (I'm not backing up TBs to SSDs yet). But in a decade..?
Media is potentially the only reason I see to go faster; move that noisy Blueray player from beside the TV and put it in another room, and stream over the network.