[SOLVED] Cat 6 and older switches

[dtjones369]

Good morning.

I have been looking into my equipment and wondering about the limitations I may not be realizing, if any.

I have run several Cat 6 cables around the house and have them plugged into an older Netgear GS716T switch. I came into 3 switches in 2013:
Netgear GS716T and a 24 port version, as well as a D-Link DGS-1016D.

Just using the GS716T, but noticed in the D-Link manual that the only cable interfaces were 3,4,5/5e, 5/5e only when it came to Gigabit. Manual was from 2011. I looked up Cat 6 and it appeared to be available in 2002.

Are my switches not compatible with Cat 6?
I only have Xfinity 300Mbps service. That appears to be fine during speed tests, even though Xfinity speed test and Speedtest.net appear to have significant differences in results. I feel like the transfer between local devices seem slow, but that is based on nothing other than, "I thought it'd be faster".

I know that it is backwards compatible, but am I missing out?

Thank you

 

[bill001g]

The port controls the speed not the cable. If you use cable that supports faster ports it makes no difference the port can only run at it maximum speed.

It is surprising you even see anything less than cat5e mentioned. I don't think they make cat5 cable anymore and cat3 is used for telephone. Cat6 cable has been a dead cable since it first appeared on the market. It was designed to run 1gbit over 2 pair instead of 4 pair of cables. All the port manufactures went with the 4 pair design and ever since you have the cable vendors trying to confuse people with specs ignoring the fact that a cat6 cable will only run at 1gbit when plugged into 1gbit ports. The newer cat6a cable is designed for 10gbit ports and is now priced almost the same as cat6 cable. Normal cat6 cable can connect to 10g ports at short distances but it is not actually part of any standard so you now might as well buy cat6a if you have 10g ports.

If you want to test your local lan network you should use a program like IPERF. You should see over 900mbps in both directions. Many times people get slower results because of things like the file system. This is a simple line mode program that test only your network and interfaces it is not affected much by anything else in the machine.

 

[boju]

File system as said along with drives between devices can have an impact too. SSD read -> network -> bottlenecked writing to a slow HDD.

 

[dtjones369]

Thank you.

Yeah, it's all Cat 6 cable that I came into within the past year. I have a brother who is a union carpenter, so he does a lot of jobs where they run cable in hospitals, schools and offices.

But all the switches I have are from 2011 and earlier.

I will check out the IPERF.