Running Gigabit ethernet on Cat 5 does work, however, you will find that many things affect the performance and you might want to keep these in mind.
1) Run length - the length of cable your signal must traverse will affect the performance. The longer the cable the worse performance. Keep your patch cables to the appropriate length, i.e. don't use a 50' cable for a 3' gap. 2) Jack quality - Most jacks will cost about $5 for a keystone category 5e jack. As such, don't buy Cat5 jacks, splurge for the 5e ones. I have yet to see the house that has very many jacks (i.e. > 100) so spending an extra $2 per jack won't cost you much. Cat6 jacks won't do you any better then Cat5e if you are still using Cat5 wire. 3) Interference - the main difference between Cat5 and Cat5e is the number of twists per foot. The more twists, the less susceptible to interference. As such, if your cable runs along next to the power lines in your house, you may see a gigabit connection, but get very bad throughput, even to the point of worse actual throughput than 100 Mbit due to noise on the line. In a residence, this should be fairly minimal as your noise generators are pretty much limited to your power lines. 4) Wiring - Gigabit uses all 8 wires in the cable. 10/100 Mb only requires wires 1,2,3, and 6. Since you are doing the wiring yourself you can be sure to attach all 8. Find yourself a good wiring chart as the pairing in gigabit cabling must be 1-2, 3-6, 4-5, 7-8. Be sure your patch cables are all Cat5e or better as this will insure they use all 8 wires, though I have yet to find any premade patch cable in the last 5 years that doesn't use all 8 wires, it is better to be safe than sorry. 5) Network switch - don't buy the cheapest switch you can find. In fact it might be worth shelling out for a decent business class switch that has network managment facilitites. These will usually cost more but will also give port statistics which will let you track down issues. Keep in mind that if you are pushing a lot of data around your network from more than just your server, but peer to peer or if you have multiple servers, that the internal bandwidth of the switch you choose is important. Many cheap Gigabit switches only support 2-3 Gb of internal bandwidth so if you have 4 machines talking to 4 other machines you can saturate your switch. Not usually an issue for home networks, but something to keep in mind. To make a long story short, get it all wired up and test it out. If you have a specific run that you think is important to get full gigabit speeds from, it might be worth re-running that wire using Cat5e cable. Andy On Fri, Oct 24, 2008 at 8:12 AM, Steve <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > As far as cabling is concerned, from my old research as I recall, cat5 > was designed for 100m, cat5e was designed for 1gb, and cat6 was for > 1gb to 10gb. It's all about the wire gauge and # of twists. Those more > twists are designed to stop interferences. I know you're not > interested in re-pulling your old cable but if you start seeing poor > speeds and dropped packets, that could very well be your issue. > --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "NLUG" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/nlug-talk?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
