Method to test cable for Cat5 or 5e

El_Watcher · 17 Nov 2008 at 14:08

Is there any easy way to tell if a cable is cat5 or cat5e? Our office is networked and we are considering going up to Gigabit, but we are not sure if the cabling is cat5 or cat5e. If it is cat5 then we wouldn't upgrade because I don't have the time to rewire the whole office.

pdw8 · 17 Nov 2008 at 14:10

It is usually printed on the cable itself. Even bespoke cabling should have it printed every metre or so.

Skidilliplop · 17 Nov 2008 at 14:11

the cable outer shiething should have it printed on it.

Edit: Gah beaten to it.

El_Watcher · 17 Nov 2008 at 14:14

But what if the cable is routed through wall cavities and stuff with no visible cable. Are there any cable testers that test max speed/bandwidth as well as continuity?

Skidilliplop · 17 Nov 2008 at 14:21

They will appear somewhere to patch into the switch. You should be able to see when it's in the loom or at worst disconnect one end and pull it back a few inches.
If you don't have a wiring loom to patch panels then you'll need to re-wire everything anyway for futureproofing.

pdw8 · 17 Nov 2008 at 14:25

El_Watcher said:
Are there any cable testers that test max speed/bandwidth as well as continuity?

There are, but they are serious bits of kit and would cost at least a few thousand pounds. The ones that most cable installers use when installing into my racks are made by Sunrise Telecom.

BoomAM · 17 Nov 2008 at 22:53

Cat 5e is fine for gigabit anyway.

whitecrook · 17 Nov 2008 at 23:42

BoomAM said:
Cat 5e is fine for gigabit anyway.

But Cat5 isn't, hence the question...

Anyway, I suspect there is no point or need to 'upgrade' to gigabit, or is there, OP? Gigabit doesn't magically make things faster, usually it means computers end up waiting faster.

El_Watcher · 18 Nov 2008 at 15:57

whitecrook said:
But Cat5 isn't, hence the question...

Anyway, I suspect there is no point or need to 'upgrade' to gigabit, or is there, OP? Gigabit doesn't magically make things faster, usually it means computers end up waiting faster.

Reason for possible upgrade is the use of Act and Sage, which we were told would work better with gigabit, because they use massive amounts of data transfer for simple database updates.

whitecrook · 18 Nov 2008 at 16:02

We use Act and Sage in our business. We recently upgraded to Gigabit with some cisco VLAN layer 3 switches. The difference in speed is non existant. The bottle neck is the disks in the servers and the desktop PCs. Not the network.

Usually in a business you should have to perform a cost benefit analysis, and determine what the problems is now and whether ehat you propose will remedy them for the cost.

And you were told they'd 'work better' Are they working well enough just now? Hoe much better fo you need them to work? How many people are using the systems? etc etc

Skidilliplop · 18 Nov 2008 at 16:35

El_Watcher said:
Reason for possible upgrade is the use of Act and Sage, which we were told would work better with gigabit, because they use massive amounts of data transfer for simple database updates.

That kind of data trauling issue would be cheaper and more easily remedied by using terminal services and keeping the data transfer disk to disk rather than haul it across the network.