Cat5e
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I got a free spool of cat5e riser cable. Should I pay for cat6 when I get a new house or use the free spool?
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@Captain Cat5e is limited to 1 gigabit, while Cat6/Cat6a will let you do 10 gigabit. I'd spring for Cat6a just to futureproof everything.
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@Unperverted-Vixen said in Cat5e:
just to futureproof everything
Until someone decides to make a newer, even faster standard. So about 5 years, tops?
(Only a very few services — notably commercial streaming video — can consistently deliver much faster than 100Mbit. They might be faster, but contention with others often reduces it to that anyway, either on the service on the network. More bandwidth just tends to end up with allowing more devices in your household to have their 100Mbit at a time…)
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@dkf Cat8 cable is actually available if you really wanted to futureproof, but it's expensive.
I agree with your point on external speeds, but I think you're overlooking traffic within the LAN. I definitely am using > 100 MBit speeds between my machines. I don't know whether my current caps are because of network or storage limitations; but even if it is storage, I wouldn't want to limit myself to 1 gigabit for the next 10-25 years.
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@Unperverted-Vixen said in Cat5e:
I wouldn't want to limit myself to 1 gigabit for the next 10-25 years.
That depends a lot on the network topology and intended usage. If @Captain is thinking of connecting a NAS to one of the 1GBit lines which all other devices will use for image backups and video streaming on the weekend, then future-proofing might make sense. But if the 1GBit lines would all lead to "normal" client devices and you're not expecting a lot of traffic on a single link, then I don't think you'll actually need 10Gbit/s anytime soon. Especially since regular consumer hardware likely won't support it anyway.
It might even make sense to mix the two - run Cat 5e lines to all "normal" rooms and a Cat 6/7 line from the router to a storage room where you're intending to put your NAS.
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Just use the Cat 5e and if, at some point many years away, there's a need to go higher than 1GBit then deal with it then, IMO.
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@loopback0 if they want to embed it in walls/baseboards, replacing it would be PITA of epic proportions. And using up 10Gbps over home network isn't that much of sci-fi. Say, you want to use your TV in living room as an additional screen for a PC in your bedroom (you want to play games on a big screen or something). An uncompressed video stream, even at just 1080p@60Hz, will take about 4Gbps. Quick googling indicates a lossless compression can put that down to 1.2-1.5Gbps - so still in excess of what Cat 5e is capable of.
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@Gąska Right but if they had aspirations for anything that required that sort of thing, they'd not even be asking the question.
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Use the free stuff for IoT and when you want anything better you'll need new stuff all around anyways.
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@loopback0 they don't want it now, but who knows, maybe 5 years from now it becomes a standard feature that everyone uses? Houses are very expensive and inconvenient to modernize, so future-proofing them is much more important than future-proofing basically anything else you're likely to own. I'm just saying, 1Gbps may be enough in short-term, but it's definitely too little in medium-term, let alone long-term. 10Gbps may be okay, but it's pushing it too. 40Gbps is a rather safe bet, at least for now - and it's not even all that more expensive.
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Say, you want to use your TV in living room as an additional screen for a PC in your bedroom (you want to play games on a big screen or something). Even with just 1080p@60Hz, you're looking at 4Gbps.
Steam In-Home Streaming works just fine over 1Gbps at 1080p.
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@dfdub I wrote that post 10 times over and it looks like the final revision is missing the most important word: uncompressed.
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@dfdub I wrote that post 10 times over and it looks like the final revision is missing the most important word: uncompressed.
I'm not disputing your math (
to do it myself), but I'd question whether that actually matters in practice, since you usually use slightly lossy compression anyway and you'll never see the difference.
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Houses are very expensive and inconvenient to modernize, so future-proofing them is much more important than future-proofing basically anything else you're likely to own.
If you're future-proofing networking in a building, you make sure it's in a channel or conduit or whatever that makes it easy to replace, or easy to run another cable alongside it or whatever. In which case you might as well use the free Cat 5e cable now and add Cat 8 or fibre later.
If you're running it the cable in a way you can't easily replace it then regardless of what you run you're
.
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@dfdub it matters when you remember that 4K is already the standard for home entertainment, and we already know it's going to get even higher soon enough. Also, VR and the dual screens inside them running at 100Hz+. Again - we're talking about building a house. It's not about what makes sense today, it's about what will make sense 10 to 20 years from now.
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@loopback0 said in Cat5e:
If you're future-proofing networking in a building, you make sure it's in a channel or conduit or whatever that makes it easy to replace
When my parents moved into a new house (and I was still living with them) in 2002 we used unused pipes intended to carry analogue phone and TV signals for TV and network signals instead. Worked pretty well, though it caused us a lot of hassle with manually crimping plugs on the network cables which none of us were very good at.
The one thing I'd change is using network wall sockets instead of cables coming out of the wall, but those weren't generally available at DIY stores at the time.
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@loopback0 said in Cat5e:
Houses are very expensive and inconvenient to modernize, so future-proofing them is much more important than future-proofing basically anything else you're likely to own.
If you're future-proofing networking in a building, you make sure it's in a channel or conduit or whatever that makes it easy to replace, or easy to run another cable alongside it or whatever. In which case you might as well use the free Cat 5e cable now and add Cat 8 or fibre later.
If you're running it the cable in a way you can't easily replace it then regardless of what you run you're
.Of course making it easy to replace is better than making it hard to replace. But even better is making it easy to replace AND not having to do it anyway. I mean, how much is Cat 8 going to cost you for the entire house? $200? Save smarter, not harder.
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it matters when you remember that 4K is already the standard for home entertainment
To me, these developments are just progress for the sake of progress. I honestly don't notice the difference between 4k and HD most of the time. A proper HDR panel with good contrast is worth so much more than a few more pixels that you won't even see from the sofa.
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it matters when you remember that 4K is already the standard for home entertainment
To me, these developments are just progress for the sake of progress.
Doesn't matter - you still need the infrastructure if you ever want to upgrade anything ever. 99.99% of people would be perfectly content with the applications they've had on their Pentium 2 PCs, but the modern world makes it impossible to use the internet on a Pentium 2 PC.
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Doesn't matter - you still need the infrastructure if you ever want to upgrade anything ever.
A 4k TV will always be able to display a 1080p stream, so that argument doesn't really apply here.
BTW: Netflix streams 4k+HDR content just fine over my shitty internet connection and 1GBit/s Ethernet, so if we take compression into account, it's also sufficient for that.
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Doesn't matter - you still need the infrastructure if you ever want to upgrade anything ever.
A 4k TV will always be able to display a 1080p stream
For now. Who knows what the future brings. I'm pretty sure my TV is literally incapable of displaying 800x600 signal.
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I'm pretty sure my TV is literally incapable of displaying 800x600 signal.
I'm 99% sure you're wrong about that. My current TV is not that old and it has no problem with displaying the output of my PS2. And most smart and not-so-smart TVs support DLNA or something similar. It'd be pretty dumb if they could talk to media servers on the LAN, but not actually play videos in lower resolutions than their native one.
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I mean, how much is Cat 8 going to cost you for the entire house? $200?
Depends on how much you need. Monoprice sells 1000-foot spools of Cat6a for $175, and Cat8 for $450.
I would definitely go with Cat6a over Cat5e, but I don't know if I'd spring for Cat8, due to the low length limits on each run.
(And I'm ignoring Cat7 because it uses different connectors.)
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@Unperverted-Vixen said in Cat5e:
I don't know if I'd spring for Cat8, due to the low length limits on each run.
24 meters is low?
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24 meters is low?
It is actually a limit you might hit if you connect all rooms in a larger house to the place where the router will go. Don't underestimate how much extra cable you'll need to get to each plug through the walls.
I live in a single-story apartment and had to use close to 20m of Cat5e to get from my router to my TV.
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@dfdub fair enough. In this case I update my recommendation:
- 40Gbps is nice if you can get it, but don't bother with wiring your whole house with it because it's not likely to actually work right now.
- 10Gbps is the bare minimum you should go with if you don't want to redo everything by 2025.
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I agree that I'll eventually want 10GBaseT.
But I'm reading that modern Cat-5e cables will do 10GB/s up to 45m. Heck, Cat6 stops working at 10GB/s at 55m, and it takes Cat-6a to get to 100m at 10GB/s.
On the other hand, I don't know if MY modern structural cat-5e cables are good enough for that.
I'm actually feeling pretty confident at this point, because the manufacturer says they test the cables up to 350Mhz, which is more than the 250Mhz Cat-6 requires...
So I guess I'll use the freebies and do what @loopback0 and @Tsaukpaetra said -- replace or use for iot.
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Meh, since the freebie is rated for interiors and exteriors, I'll save it for running a line to the guest house.
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@Captain BTW. What happened to your avatar? I can barely recognize you.
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@Gąska got lost due to a discobug or something. Avatar icon is on pc, which I haven't been using lately.
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@Gąska It'd also be possible to put a plastic tube into the wall and pull the wire through that. Then you can replace it later.
