Cat 5 or Cat 6 What is the differnce between cat 5 and cat 6 network cable? Am in the middle of refurbishing our house and have decided to put a network, but not sure which category of cable to use ?
Cat 5 is standard network cable. Cat 6 is network cable as well but uses higher quality wire and connectors to reduce noise. It's also backwards compatible. Maximum bandwidth on Cat 5 cable (if you have the right network cards) is 1GBit/s. On Cat 6 it's up to 10Gbit/sec. Cat 5 is more than enough for a home network
whats the cost difference? cat5e is sufficent for home use, most businesses now only get Cat6 installed
you mastered breaking WPA2 with AES like? I imagine Cat6 will be quite alot more expensive, but cba to google it.
If you buy a 305 meter box on ebay Cat 5 is about 14p/meter Cat 6 is about 16p/meter Don't think i'd need that much, but can always sell what i dont use back on ebay
Not true really. Reason I say this is we install CAT5 networks with our traditional digital telephone systems and IP PBXs, together with 10/100/1000 data switches and so far only an architect passing massive files over the network requested CAT6 infrastructure so that they could use a 10gig network in the years to come when the PCs were upgraded to be fast enough to handle that amount of data. Colleges and Universities require CAT6 it on a lot of tenders too, but in general 95% of our cabling installations for businesses in the North East are defo CAT5 for voice and data.
You find that at the core/distribution level of a network, they fit it with as fast as they can get (10gbps, fibre or cat6). Lower down at the access level (at the desktop where PCs tend to be plugged in) it tends to be cat5. Where I work at the moment, we support the DWP and I'm part of the team that looks after their entire network. Even on the converged sites, the PC with phones attached have their connections hard set to 10mbps. The servers are set to 1gbps, and the switch interlinks are usually 1gbps/10gbps. We're seeing more places opting for cat6 throughout now when they're upgraded - given the small increase in cabling it's a good investment and saves it being done again when they actually need the bandwidth.
