[SOLVED] Cat6 - Choosing the right Type of Cable

[patrocle]

I need to run 2 ethernet cables, a 50 ft and a 70 ft.
*50 ft will to to my master bedroom where will connect to a Ethernet hub and then will have one ethernet cable to my tv and one to the dvr from xfinity.
*70 ft will go downstairs where will be directly connecting to a Asus Router to create a Aimesh in house downstairs.
Now, i do have security ip cameras (poe), wired POE, and using Cat5e cable and ends done by me.
This is the cable used on the Cat5e right now:
Shireen DC-1021 Outdoor CAT5e FTP - Shielded - 1000ft Spool
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B009WA56NK
with this ends:
RJ45 Cat5 Cat5e Connectors End Pass Through Gold Plated 8P8C UTP Ethernet Network Plug
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07VZM477M

My Question is as i want to go with Cat6 as maybe a better cable, will this one here be okay?:

fast Cat. Cat6 Ethernet Cable 1000ft - 23 AWG, CMR,
Insulated Solid Bare Copper Wire Internet Cable with Noise Reducing Cross Separator -
550MHZ / 10 Gigabit Speed UTP LAN Cable 1000 ft -
CMR (Blue)

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07JB4W6MF/

with this ends:
Cat6 RJ45 Ends, CableCreation 100-PACK Cat6 Connector,
Cat6 / Cat5e RJ45 Connector, Ethernet Cable Crimp Connectors
UTP Network Plug for Solid Wire and Standard Cable, Transparent
https://www.amazon.com/CableCreation-100-PACK-Connector-Connectors-Transparent/dp/B01K9Z4FT2

Thanks and appreciate your advice.

Xfinity 1.2giga internet plan. ( 1200 Mbps)
Cable Modem: Netgear CM1100
Wifi Router: Asus RT-AX86U

 

[bill001g]

If you already have the cat5e cable then just use it.

The only issue I would have with it is you are using shielded cable and not using the proper ends and not properly grounding the shield. Pretty much everyone installs shielded cable wrong because it is almost impossible to do correctly outside of a data center that has all the special grounding connectors.
Not that this really matters other than a waste of money. Shielding if installed properly will prevent interference from outside the cable. Installed without grounds it actually acts as a antenna and increases the interference. The reason it all doesn't matter is the interference it will either decrease or increases does not exist in the first place in a home install. It is more used in large industrial setting or things like medical setting where they are worried about the ethernet cable interfering with the equipment rather than the reverse.

I am not sure about that cat6 cable. The specs almost appear as if it was really cat6a but you would think they would say that if it was.

In any case normal cat6 cable is pretty much a waste of money. It will not run faster or better than cat5e cable. It was designed to run 1gbit over 2 pair of wires rather than 4. That standard was never adopted so cat6 cable has been pretty much a dead standard since it was invented but consumer buy it purely because the number is bigger which they somehow think is better.

If you needed 10g you would use cat6a since that is rated to the full 100 meters at 10g. A couple years ago you would never think about using cat6a cable because of the cost. What has happened is the cost of copper metal has gotten so high that the cat5e cable has increased in price so much that extra cost to manufacture cat6a is not as much as it was before. Because both are now expensive you many times can consider cat6a espeically if you are going to install it in walls.

In your case since you already have the cable I would just use the cable you have. There is no advantage to buying cable with a bigger number. If you feel you actually are going to run 10gbit then buy cat6a. We are going to have to see what the price of copper metal does in the future. This was already increasing well before the current inflation we see on all other things.

 

[patrocle]

Thanks for reply.
I'm only have about 30ft left of the cat5e cable , so that's why i was looking to get another 1000ft of cable or even 500ft to do my next 2 projects and to have some extra in case i need for my ip cameras if i need to run another wire for it, somewhere.
Hmm, now i see what i did wrong... with the cat5e! Use the wrong connectors with no ground, i guess i was kind new at this but now i see the point.
Will have to see what i will go with now.
Thanks for your advice.

 

[patrocle]

What connectors u recommend for cat6 w/ 23awg that have the grounding option too? I am have quite time finding the right one.
And as for the cable thinking about getting this one here:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07C848GTK/

Thanks,

 

[bill001g]

Don't even bother with the grounded rj45. They are the ones with that have a metal shell. Problem is the equipment you plug them into needs a tab to connect to it that will ground it. That is very uncommon even in commercial equipment.

The ground is normally done in the wall plates. Again this is not something you can do in a home network. The ground can not be the same wire as your electical ground. That ground is used for safety reasons and you might get power into your lan cable if there is a strange short. What is much more likely though is some device actually causes interference on the ground wire someplace in your house and it then get put onto your ethernet cable.

What you need is a completely seperate ground wire on both end. In effect you are running another copper wire from the ground rod in your house to each jack. In data centers they have special ground blocks they hook all the racks too so it is pretty easy. In a house you would almost have to rip the walls up to run it.

That cable should be fine. Just use any rj45 jack. The only real difference you see is ones for solid core and stranded wire. Almost everything you find will be solid core wire. I don't know if there really is any difference between a cat5e and cat6 rj45.

 

[patrocle]

Thanks for your advice! Appreciated.
Regards,

 

[palladin9479]

If you already have the cat5e cable then just use it.

The only issue I would have with it is you are using shielded cable and not using the proper ends and not properly grounding the shield. Pretty much everyone installs shielded cable wrong because it is almost impossible to do correctly outside of a data center that has all the special grounding connectors.
Not that this really matters other than a waste of money. Shielding if installed properly will prevent interference from outside the cable. Installed without grounds it actually acts as a antenna and increases the interference. The reason it all doesn't matter is the interference it will either decrease or increases does not exist in the first place in a home install. It is more used in large industrial setting or things like medical setting where they are worried about the ethernet cable interfering with the equipment rather than the reverse.

I am not sure about that cat6 cable. The specs almost appear as if it was really cat6a but you would think they would say that if it was.

In any case normal cat6 cable is pretty much a waste of money. It will not run faster or better than cat5e cable. It was designed to run 1gbit over 2 pair of wires rather than 4. That standard was never adopted so cat6 cable has been pretty much a dead standard since it was invented but consumer buy it purely because the number is bigger which they somehow think is better.

If you needed 10g you would use cat6a since that is rated to the full 100 meters at 10g. A couple years ago you would never think about using cat6a cable because of the cost. What has happened is the cost of copper metal has gotten so high that the cat5e cable has increased in price so much that extra cost to manufacture cat6a is not as much as it was before. Because both are now expensive you many times can consider cat6a espeically if you are going to install it in walls.

In your case since you already have the cable I would just use the cable you have. There is no advantage to buying cable with a bigger number. If you feel you actually are going to run 10gbit then buy cat6a. We are going to have to see what the price of copper metal does in the future. This was already increasing well before the current inflation we see on all other things.

The extra channels are definitely used for CAT5e and 6, it's how you can get the higher signaling rates in the first place. Cut wires 4, 5, 7, 8 and what you just did was half the effective bandwidth of that cable. The original CAT3 and CAT5 specification had the two extra channels there to support two phone lines along with a data connector on a single wire. They saw use in the corporate world back in the 90's but it never really caught on and digital PBX's replaced that functionality. Those wires were then used to carry power for POE devices, which are extremely common these days, think digital security cameras, badge scanners, dock locks and other internally networked devices. Once gigabyte networking started to be developed, they wanted a way to make it cheap to patch ethernet devices with short cables and decided to re-use the spare channel for extra bandwidth. Switch's will autosense the present of that channel and negotiate the speed with the end point. CAT5 is speced for 100Mhz per channel, CAT5e can get 125Mhz, CAT6 is 250HZ and up with CAT6A over 500MHZ. CAT7 exists but that's for datacenters and not that common since anyone putting that much data over that long a distance would just use fiber instead.

Now those signaling rates are the specified distances, usually 70~100 meters, going shorter lets us get higher effective signaling rates without crosstalk causing errors. The reason CAT6 has that little plastic piece in the middle is to seperate the channels to further reduce crosstalk, which is how we can get 10Gbps with it over moderate distances and 1Gbps over long distances, though again anyone pushing data that far might be better suited with fiber. You were right about the whole shielded thing, almost nobody does it right. Even inside datacenters, the patch panels usually aren't wired with a separate ground for the shielding and mostly used at the top of rack level.

 

[bill001g]

The extra channels are definitely used for CAT5e and 6, it's how you can get the higher signaling rates in the first place. Cut wires 4, 5, 7, 8 and what you just did was half the effective bandwidth of that cable. The original CAT3 and CAT5 specification had the two extra channels there to support two phone lines along with a data connector on a single wire. They saw use in the corporate world back in the 90's but it never really caught on and digital PBX's replaced that functionality. Those wires were then used to carry power for POE devices, which are extremely common these days, think digital security cameras, badge scanners, dock locks and other internally networked devices. Once gigabyte networking started to be developed, they wanted a way to make it cheap to patch ethernet devices with short cables and decided to re-use the spare channel for extra bandwidth. Switch's will autosense the present of that channel and negotiate the speed with the end point. CAT5 is speced for 100Mhz per channel, CAT5e can get 125Mhz, CAT6 is 250HZ and up with CAT6A over 500MHZ. CAT7 exists but that's for datacenters and not that common since anyone putting that much data over that long a distance would just use fiber instead.

Now those signaling rates are the specified distances, usually 70~100 meters, going shorter lets us get higher effective signaling rates without crosstalk causing errors. The reason CAT6 has that little plastic piece in the middle is to seperate the channels to further reduce crosstalk, which is how we can get 10Gbps with it over moderate distances and 1Gbps over long distances, though again anyone pushing data that far might be better suited with fiber. You were right about the whole shielded thing, almost nobody does it right. Even inside datacenters, the patch panels usually aren't wired with a separate ground for the shielding and mostly used at the top of rack level.

Cat6 is not actually certified for 10g. People just know it works at 50 meters but there is no official standards document that says that.....unless you know of one. Cat6a is the official certification for 10g and it can go the full 100 meters. Cat7 was never fully certified and provide no real advantage over cat6a. In theory it has less interference between the pairs but it does not run farther or faster. There is some newer update to the standard that now includes 2.5 and 5g but a lot of these documents are locked behind paywalls.

Cat6 cable was designed to run 1gbit over 2 pair of wire rather than all 4 pair. The device manufactures went with the cat5e standard instead. I think I saw 1 board from cisco that could run 1000tx (ie not 1000t). The cable manufacture not wanting to lose their inventment started their marketing of techno babble trying to say cat6 cable is better than cat5e. This is similar to cat7 cable. People need to stop blindly believe bigger numbers mean better.

Pretty much you buy cat5e cable or you buy cat6a.

 

[palladin9479]

What happens when you plug a cable into an autodetecting port, which is all of them these days, is both sides sense which channels are connected then start with their highest supported frequency and work down until they get a stable connection. This is why you can run higher then rated speeds on short connections. Yes the other channels are definitely connected and used, I've run enough Cat5/Cat6 cable to have messed up the extra channels and caused auto-sense errors on the port. People will probably never need them on short runs because you will hit the interface max speed even on crappy copper at less then 30 feet.

Category of cable isn't so much about speed as the quality and tolerances of the materials used in construction. Better materials and construction means less crosstalk and the signal can go further before becoming noisy. The standardized distance is 100 meters, or 328 feet for those not used to working in metric. Now how many people are actually using a 300+ foot Ethernet cable in their homes? Most everyone is using 50 to maybe 100 foot, which less then a third of the rated distance. It's how I can get 10GbE working between my storage and ESXI host using CAT-5E patch cables.

Long ethernet runs are very common in places that need to have a wide distribution layer like hotels and office buildings. You get a set of floor switches that have ethernet cables running to cubicle desks that could easily exceed 50~70 meteres, like the one I'm plugged into right now. In those situations you end up going with a higher cable standard to ensure signal integrity because you don't want to buy a ton of media converters.

And yes Cat7 exists and they are even working on Cat8, though why anyone would want to push a 40Gbps ethernet connection that far over copper is anyone's guess.

 

[bill001g]

And yes Cat7 exists and they are even working on Cat8, though why anyone would want to push a 40Gbps ethernet connection that far over copper is anyone's guess.

Cat7 cable "officially" does not exist. This is the difference between something being certified and not. Only 2 of the 3 groups that make up the certifications approved it the third did not.

The problem with say using cat5e at 10g is you can not guarantee it will always work. Even cat6 cable might work to 50 meters on some brand but on other only go say 40 meters. Someone installing stuff for profession usage can not just go by what a bunch of guys that post to forums or have youtube video say.

A cat5e ethernet cable can easily run the full 100 meter limit at full gigabit speeds. That is what the cable certification requires the cable be able to do. Now maybe someone is selling fake cables if they do not go the full distance.

I myself have used things like cat5e at 10gbit but that does not mean my personal experience means anything, the standard does state that it will work unless you have cat6a cable.

 

[palladin9479]

Cat7 cable "officially" does not exist. This is the difference between something being certified and not. Only 2 of the 3 groups that make up the certifications approved it the third did not.

The problem with say using cat5e at 10g is you can not guarantee it will always work. Even cat6 cable might work to 50 meters on some brand but on other only go say 40 meters. Someone installing stuff for profession usage can not just go by what a bunch of guys that post to forums or have youtube video say.

A cat5e ethernet cable can easily run the full 100 meter limit at full gigabit speeds. That is what the cable certification requires the cable be able to do. Now maybe someone is selling fake cables if they do not go the full distance.

I myself have used things like cat5e at 10gbit but that does not mean my personal experience means anything, the standard does state that it will work unless you have cat6a cable.

By that logic Cat6 cables do not exist because it was never ratified. EIA is extremely slow at ratifying anything, they only ratified Cat6A because Cat7 was created by venders and approved by ISO. The cause for EIA being super slow is that they were pushing "fiber to the endpoint" and wanted everyone to stop using copper entirely instead of just making ever faster copper standards.

Funny that you changed your argument from "standards don't matter" to "standards do matter". Wiring all four pairs is part of the ISO standard because that is how you guarantee the rates speeds at the rated distance. I was explaining how sometimes things seem to work even when they shouldn't. The cable don't have any active communication component, instead the adapters start out with the highest frequency and work their own down until a stable connection is made. Shorter cables allow higher frequencies, so you can get 500mhz over a 3 meter Cat5e cable for instance, but would only get 100mhz at 100 meters.