On Fri, 2008-10-24 at 08:46 -0400, Andrew Farnsworth wrote: > 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.
Cat 5e is typically rated to 350mb. Make that Cat6 cable. Cat 6 is also a bit different in the structure of the cable. Andy hit all of those points correctly. Keep in mind that the twist just before hitting the jacks can make a difference. Length of the cable at Gigabit speed makes a big difference. If you do have to run a long length of cable and it needs high bandwidth switch to fiber. Dave > > 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 -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
