Can Cat5e do 2.5gbps?

Curtis vincent

Curtis vincent

Curtis vincent

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Recently moved in to our first home we just bought. It was built in 2018 and I thought it had ethernet wired round the whole house but upon further inspection its actually BT phone connections. They all terminate at the same spot where our Fibre modem is. we had an engineer from openreach come to upgrade the modem so we can get 1.6gbps, I asked him about the connections and neither of us could understand the point of BT phone connections in a new house built these days. He said if I was lucky it might be either cat 5e or cat 6 cable with only 1 twisted pair used. He was correct, I took of one of the face plates and could see printed on the cable was Cat5e. I've seen online that you can only get 1gbps over cat5e, but I thought it was possible to get faster over shorter runs?

Am I right or is there no point paying for over 1gbps. (wifi in this house sucks even when using a wifi7 mesh)
 
pre said:
It's the error rates which will be higher in lower quality wiring but yes it's not noticeable on short domestic runs.
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I did try to have a look at what little I could have the cable to see if there were any other markings. They came from a local supplier, found the website but no good information other than it really just being bulk Cat5e sold for trade. I can't imagine there's runs any longer than 10-15m. the most important room I have my PC in is directly above where it all terminates anyway
 
Curtis vincent said:
I've seen online that you can only get 1gbps over cat5e, but I thought it was possible to get faster over shorter runs?
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2.5Gbps and 5Gbps were both designed with the express aim to get faster speeds over existing Cat5e cabling (rather than having to rip it out and replace with Cat6/6A). As such you will be absolutely fine, especially at the lengths in a typical home network.
 
I put 10Gb over 5e solid core copper all the time, but have begun moving to fibre, I went with OM4, but the people spec’ing and installing current gen stuff tell me I am better off with SMF as that’s what is currently spec’d for commercial and DC builds (and in effect what CF etc. deploy for network build), in my case I have spare transceivers that are proven, so it’s just the cheaper option for me.
 
Armageus said:
If you want >10gbps you generally just move to fibre
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Ultimately I would, I suspect the difficulty would be running new cables and/or taking out the old cables. If I wanted to I would be lifting floorboards and there is no space to run any more cables so the 4 Cat5e would be aggregated, of course it isn't a huge distance so 10G would probably be possible.

I do actually run a fibre cable in the attic to a switch in the same cabinet, it was really only something I bought to see how it worked, unfortunately it is only aggregated for 2G, little point in going any faster, the other 2 cables are used for a backup TP-Link modem and an access point.
 
You may not need to depending on your layout. The way I have done it is a single fibre drop to each floor, then use a budget Chinese mixed media switch to break that out to 2.5Gb copper using existing 5e, this means as/when clients are upgraded, the 2.5Gb ports already have the capacity to supply them, and a simple floor switch upgrade can bring that to 10Gb over 5e potentially.
 
Curtis vincent said:
ETF?
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I presume he means early termination fee, but YouFibre normally either pay you out of your contract, or charge you £1 a month until your existing contract tie in period ends!

I'm with YouFibre, only on the 1gbps package, but absolutely superb service. Only thing to look out for is them using CGNAT but you can buy a static IP for +£5 a month. Not sure if EE use CGNAT or not.

There's a thread on here somewhere with a few of us using YouFibre, can also help out with referral if you want, both get some credit then :)
 
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