Cat6e?

Looking to do the same now myself as getting fibre in on Thursday after years of hitting things when streaming buffered if I tried to view 720+ linked to my TV.
Man I can't wait...

Just been looking at cables on Amazon and they range of 60p for 10m cat5e, to £10 for 20m cat6 advertised as better quality.
Hard to judge from reviews as many say the cheap cable is great...but a few said they can't get anywhere near their fibre optic speed using the cheap ones.

I'm getting rid of all wireless in the house. Currently got desktop, ps3 and laptop on wireless and 360 on cable. So I need 3 more cables...don't want to pay £30 if £3 would suffice. But also don't want to wait a few days for the cheap stuff to arrive only to find they suck.

I've always found the cheap stuff works fine in the past. My TV picture is amazing from a 10p HDMI cable and my surround sound sounds insane from a £1 optical lead but some of these cheap ethernet cables sound a bit dodgy. Maybe they are not truly cat5e as advertised...

Might just buy 1 of the £10 ones and 1 of the 60p ones and compare to be on the safe side!!!


My connection will be 57MB so about 0.45gbps meaning cat5e is more than enough - so guess I ought to do some digging to see if these cables are what they say they are
 
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blitzwing85 said:
My connection will be 57MB so about 0.45gbps meaning cat5e is more than enough - so guess I ought to do some digging to see if these cables are what they say they are
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0.45gbps is 450mbps so you've got confused somewhere. A network cable would basically need to be faulty to not be able to handle to bandwidth offered by a normal UK fibre connection. Cat5e has 15 to 20 times more bandwidth than actually required.
 
bremen1874 said:
0.45gbps is 450mbps so you've got confused somewhere. A network cable would basically need to be faulty to not be able to handle to bandwidth offered by a normal UK fibre connection. Cat5e has 15 to 20 times more bandwidth than actually required.
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Have I got it wrong then?
I thought 57megabytes per second x 8 is 456 megabits per second which is 0.45 gbps?

cat5e was mentioned to do 1gbps meaning i'm fine..that's what I was meaning.

But i have a feeling these cables may be advertised as being cat5e when in fact they are not.

My current internet speed is 16mbps so either way it won't be hard to be 10 better than that at least. lol
 
Assuming it's a BT FTTC connection your estimated speed will be quoted in Mbps not MBps so there's no bytes to bits conversion to be done. 57mbps = 0.057gbps.

If you've currently got 16mbps you're looking at a x3.5 increase in speed. It'll probably actually be a bit better than that as the estimators tend to be a bit conservative.

10 x better than your existing connection would obviously be 160mbps. A normal FTTC connection peaks at about 72mbps, even Virgin's best effort is only 120mbps.
 
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bremen1874 said:
Assuming it's a BT FTTC connection your estimated speed will be quoted in Mbps not MBps so there's no bytes to bits conversion to be done. 57mbps = 0.057gbps.

If you've currently got 16mbps you're looking at a x3.5 increase in speed. It'll probably actually be a bit better than that as the estimators tend to be a bit conservative.

10 x better than your existing connection would obviously be 160mbps. A normal FTTC connection peaks at about 72mbps, even Virgin's best effort is only 120mbps.
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Turns out I was indeed getting mixed up. Right in the middle of buying a 2nd house from her parents and renting it back to one of them then buying a 3rd one later....and so many things going back and forth my head is spinning. Argh

Reading your reply got me panicking as i'd estimated 20x faster speeds with fibre optics.
So i went away and checked properly!

Turns out that right now I get 2.8mbps (not 16...lol no idea where that came from).
My download speeds in the browser run at max 350KBps (although average only 250KBps which is even worse at 2mbps).
As fibre is 57mbps that's the 20x increase I had in mind! Phew.

I think i'll go to sleep now...:rolleyes:


So yeah, even 10x better would be 28mbps which is plenty so i'm happy again!! I'll just get a cheap 60p cable and test it out before ordering the rest. I already have 1 good one anyway from work so at leats 1 device can make use of it until I order more even if the cheap cable restricts it.
 
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If you all really want to 'future proof' (which is actually remarkably difficult/impossible) your homes, the Cat7 ISO certification was released in August internationally and it is now readily available. I actually have a sample on my desk.
 
bertles86 said:
If you all really want to 'future proof' (which is actually remarkably difficult/impossible) your homes, the Cat7 ISO certification was released in August internationally and it is now readily available. I actually have a sample on my desk.
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what are the changes from cat6 to 7?
 
oldestgregg said:
Hi.I currently have standard copper cable internet from o2 and the router is downstairs,while my pc is upstairs.i run a cat5 ethernet cable (50m)through the roof and all is fine.However,I am getting bt fibre next week and was wondering-

1/ Will the fact the cable is 50m degrade the signal in any way? and
2/ will a cat6e cable make any noticeable difference?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.Please excuse any naivety before its pointed out :D
p.s-speed for fibre is 78mg down/20 up
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Point 2) From CAT5 yes it will, but if you're on CAT5e (in case you made a mistake) then there will be very little difference since it handles gigabit transfer speeds.
 
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