Cat 5e, Cat 6 or Cat 6a for home networking

[Avalon]

I've been wondering about this. 5e is looking the best option for a normal house at speeds up to 10Gb. I presume it's not too difficult to install?

5e is slightly easier to work with and more forgiving of bend radius. In terms of ease, it’s not bad, but it depends on if the property is empty or furnished and what route you want to take and how adamant you are that the cable won’t be seen. Exterior runs coming out of air bricks and running behind guttering are normally quite unobtrusive and minimally invasive for exterior, interior wise I normally find a route to the lift and then bring it down. My own property is 3 floors, I hijacked the old boiler flue and put access hatches in each floor, I was briefly considering a run parallel to the soil stack, but an over enthusiastic plasterer replaced a ceiling quicker than anticipated. In other scenario’s I have run behind skirting or under floor, occasionally using flat cable next to gripper rods for cosmetic reasons. Whatever you need to do, it’s usually not as difficult as you think it will be. You get bonus points for rope and conduit though

 

[pp111]

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.

For me, Cat 6 is silly cheap so why not? It isn't any more difficult or expensive to terminate.

I have cat5e in the walls of my house but I later moved to a system of conduits which now contain Cat6. Not that they need it, just why not? Some are in the walls some are not. Thing is that over the years I changed the network layout so things moved around and I needed the ability to re-wire as necessary. So if you plan then plan for change. Make things as flexible as you can. If you think you need a cable to a location, put down two! Use conduits as much as you can.

 

[Deleted member 77746]

cat 5e is future proof it goes to 10G

 

[Uhtred]

Ensure the electrician has experience with cat5e and above cabling. I've seen so many bodges.

100% this. I got to a friend's house and found the electrician had run the network cables as you would a ring circuit! By the time I got there everything had been covered & painted and there was no possibility of running more cables back to a central point and I just had to make do with what I had been given. Nightmare

 

[HEADRAT]

I use 5e and run 10 Gb around the house and I’ve had no issues.

Yup, same.

 

[Scam]

I would still get a price for the additional work, but expect it to be disproportionate to what’s required.

The problem, put simply, is LONDON PRICES. We charge a basic rate of £35+VAT per hour for labour and materials are effectively at cost. But we're in Norfolk. I'd say in London you could be looking at 80+VAT for labour. And it's probably 4-8 hours work. Cable is £0.20-£0.50+VAT per meter and I'd guess at probably under 100m for a small house with multiple drops run externally. Less if you're running internally. Then £5-£10+VAT per wall box (it doesn't really matter if it's 1,2,3 or 4 RJ45 sockets). If you're doing it correctly then £100+VAT for a wall mounted frame and patch panel. Somewhere between £500 and £1500 depending on exactly what you wanted. And before you ask - no, we don't come to London because, well.... London .

So what does running ethernet actually involve? I assumed it would be similar to what the electrician does. Or are we talking different holes in the walls etc. Do they have to be on different faceplates? Total newb here as you can probably tell.

We had an electrician round today who seemed pretty happy with the state of things. So we're likely to just ask him to quote for an electrical safety/check, adding some sockets in some rooms, but perhaps not ethernet. We mentioned it but he didn't seem that confident. I have visions of him making holes in the wall for his stuff, then doing our plastering and painting, then another guys coming round to run ethernet and making more holes in the wall and generally ruining our good work

 

[WJA96]

So what does running ethernet actually involve? I assumed it would be similar to what the electrician does. Or are we talking different holes in the walls etc. Do they have to be on different faceplates? Total newb here as you can probably tell.

We had an electrician round today who seemed pretty happy with the state of things. So we're likely to just ask him to quote for an electrical safety/check, adding some sockets in some rooms, but perhaps not ethernet. We mentioned it but he didn't seem that confident. I have visions of him making holes in the wall for his stuff, then doing our plastering and painting, then another guys coming round to run ethernet and making more holes in the wall and generally ruining our good work

The only gotchas with CATx cable is not damaging it while bending it and not terminating it into patch blocks with a screwdriver. I’ve seen so many sparky’s think it’s OK to force the terminals into the patch blocks and they’re never quite right. And for some reason they don’t seem to get the whole A and B thing and you get all sorts of combinations even on one job. And they certainly don’t have the gear to certify the connections. Can you imagine if they turned up on a job with a hammer. That’s the only tool they had. And they hammered every connection home with their hammer. That’s what they do with network connections.

I don’t claim to be an electrician, so why do they think they can claim to be network installers?