wow...retract claws...I agree with both of you to some extent...Impaqt is right that very few, if any, residential installations of Cat5e will pass gigabit cert...none of mine have. Part of this could be the connectors at each end...which are not yet rated, en masse, for gigabit or even Cat-6....flip side is this, the industry is slowing down, at least a little, and it seems that the tilt toward fiber for gigabit may begin to re-kindle itself, versus the widespread application of cat-6, then 7, etc...

The thing is, if you sell a client on fiber, it's future proof for MANY generations. Hell, the entire City of Chicago's phone network works on two fibers into the main switch (so I'm told). Cat5, 5e, 6, 6e and 7 will all eventually be overloaded... but there has been no talk about EVER overloading a fiber, if only because it's so much different in it's transmission technique.

BTW, we are running Audio-Cat to VC/Control locations, and will run Cat-6 as sson as pricing comes down. Our individual cable runs are all currently Cat5e unless requested otherwise, although we are talking about the upgrade to Cat6 as standard.

avdude