CAt5e or Cat6? What would you use for your residential customer and why? (other than price of wire). Will Cat6 be neccessary any time soon? Is it worth the difference for "future proofing"?

Scoop

What is your definition of "soon" when it comes to a new home? Most Homes I prewire are expected to be around for quite some time.... Not many people are knocking down 3-5 year old homes to build new.

I'll tell ya one thing... Streaming video will play a hell of a lot nicer with a Gigabit network than a standard 100 BaseT........

(I wire all Network with Cat6... ave been for quite some time)

Cat5e is great for phones...

come on dude. Cat5E is good for Gigabit, which is way more than most homes will ever see. When MOST people think about prewire for a network, there thinking INTERNET ACCESS. They need to understand that they wont be accessing the INTERNET at anything even close to 10 base T, yet 1000.

Cat5e is the standard, Go with the standard. You client will be safe and not OVERSOLD. The people makng these IP products need clients to sell them too, therfore there gear there market to what 90% of households aree built on 10/100. Even when streaming becomes more popular, they will find a way to perfect it to work on 10/100.

Impaqt, why stop at 6? Why not go 7 or fiber? Is there an END?

Wow.. I really didnt think you were that closed minded about this stuff jaws.... What really is the price difference in the end for a client? $5-$10 a jack?

Fact of the matter is, Cat-5e is good for the Company because we use excessive amounts of cable and it does indeed save a lot over the course of a year, however, Cat-6 is better for the client as it is a better cable and is more stable in a pre construction enviroment.

ANd Yes, When Cat-7 is finalized I will offer that as an option for the first 6 months, then as the wire comes down a bit in price, it will indeed be my standard.

I did a bit of Fiber about 5 years ago.... But since no home devices started taking advantage of it, I stopped.

Cat 5/5e/6/7 are all Copper based UTP cable. Anything designed to run on Cat-5 can run on 5e, 6, or 7 so I'm NOT selling a White Elephant.

Whens the last time you had one of your cat5e jobs Certified for Gigabit network use? Once Cat-5 is put into a wall and bent all over the place, very few actually pass certification for gigabit.

Impaqt

Im not closed minded, just realistic.

Just dont know why your stopping at CAT6 if thats your approach.

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

Huh? Fiber just isnt used in residential applications.... Cat7 isnt offical yet....

What would you like me to put in above cat6?

Do a test next time your specing a Computer network prewire.... Just Offer the upgrade to Cat-6 for $20 more a jack.

Once you realize people do indeed want their homes wiring top notch, you'll start standardizing it.

.... Or maybe not................

Iv installed plenty of CAT6 in my days, EVen as far back as 2 years ago when it was first released. Gigabit in the average residence is just an over sell. Kinda like installing 12x2 monster cable for there distributed audio system.

Unless your dealing with a geek who know what he wants, and understands that the hardware is gonna cost more than his whole house is worth, than go for it.

There is no right or wrong answer, just preference, and standards.

Being an ex-Data/Telecomms guy I'd be willing to bet BIG dollars that the entire city of Chicago is not run on only two fibers. Even if it was run on two fibers, how may wave lengths? Alot !

More than likely they have at least 2 fiber sonet rings for the city of chicago. That usually involves multiple single mode fibers between individual sonet ring nodes.

IMHO, if you're concerned about gigabit datarate throughput, fiber is the only proper cabling solution. Twisted pair (copper) is not a good technical solution for gigabit datarate applications, as it is easly corrupted by external distrubers (electrical noise). Speaking from experience, it's not that easy to manage the electrical noise environment in a common household. I've personally seen a halogen floor lamp corrupted the ADSL signals, on a nearby Cat5 cable. There's a lot of poorly design houshold appliances out there.

Cat5e is good for a 350Mb datarate. Even, if there were some applications that did move this sort of amount of data it would be bursty in nature (typical IP data behaviour) and do you really need a Vette to go to the grocery store? No, but it would be fun.

Also, most real world IBM mainframe installations are just starting to use gigabit interfaces. Outside of core data network routers, switches and the like, the only place I can think of requiring gigabit data transfer rate is in a graphics workstation environment.


Just my 2 cents

But people will be looking to stream HD around their house in the near future. My understanding is that we will need Cat6 to accomplish that.

Maybe so.

Im having a hard enuff time just selling HD to my clients. With all the "by the year 200X everthing wil be HD", it seems they keep rolling that date up by a fear years while hardware prices drop.

Im all for selling the prewire, but dont call it future proffing. The only thing that is "future Proff" is a home run conduit back to an equipment closet.!

hey jaws....you can fill a conduit pretty fast...especially if you didn't run all the good stuff in the first place....he he he

ROFLMAO

inteset showed an HD recorder/player at Cedia. It had 1000baseT output for distributed HD.

I'm COMPLETELY with FRR here...

I would not want to run Gigabit on ANYTHING other than fiber. Cat6 will handle it (supposedly) but that too will eventually be filled up.

My first mentor in this industry was a sound engineer for NASA shuttle flights in Houston....he explained it to me this way, which I have used on MANY customers, and a boss or two!

Think of wire as a means of carrying water....

A Single Cat5e can carry as much data (water) as a fully pressureized one inch garden hose....

A single RG-6 can carry as much data (water) as a fully pressureized 4 inch fire hose...

A single strand of fiber (most bundled cabling today has TWO strands) can carry as much data (water) as a fully pressureized (God help us) 12 FOOT Culvert...

I don't know yet where a Cat6 would fit into this analogy, but I think it's right around the fire hose...it still ain't touchin the culvert....

This could all be bull, but he was an engineer who studied these things, so I had to take it on face value...I do know I've run things on fiber that made Cat5e fall over and die...

avdude

In response to the orignal post, I've been running Belden's bonded-pair Cat5e for networking applications and "vanilla" Cat5/Cat5e for telephone and misc. control circuits. The bonded pairs mitigate performance degradation resulting from bends and harnessing during installation. This feature, along with a 350MHz bandwidth, yields installations that will easily meet the needs of 99% home users for many years to come. When properly installed, Cat5e DOES support gigabit Ethernet, which is more than sufficient for streaming HD and multichannel audio (when such applications actually emerge).

For a more detailed examination of the subject, see:
[Link: networkcomputing.com]
(The article is three years old, but still offers valuable insight.)

-Max