New house - CAT6 or CAT7 cables?

[Guest]

Hi guys, I am building new house and in next days cables and data cables will be installed. Which cable for good speed in future should I use? CAT6 or CAT7? Dont you know if I use CAT7 cables, is possible to use it with standard CAT6 connectors of todays devices? THANK YOU!

 

[ur6beersaway]

CAT-7a wins IMHO http://www.xmultiple.com/xwebsite-forum24.htm
CAT 7 is backwards compatible with traditional Cat5 and Cat6 Ethernet.

 

[das_stig]

If you have the ££ then go for the best for future network bandwidth.

 

[bill001g]

What do you mean "future". This is the same silly thing people did to put in cat6 rather than cat5e. Guess what the market went from 1g which runs fine on 5e directly to 10g which requires cat6a or cat7. All those people who thought they would "save" money in the future found out they wasted it. The now run 1g over their very expensive (at install time) cat6 cable and if they ever want to go faster will have to replace it just as if they had put in cat5e.

The question is do you really think that home machines will be able to actually use 10g even in the next 10yrs. If you look at what most people have even 1g is very much more than they can possibly use. You have to come up with very specialized conditions to even need more than 100m. Your average person likely uses less than 10m since all they to do is surf the internet.

So you need to be very good at predicting the future, by the time affordable 10g interface reach the consumer market and applications actually need to transfer that what other technology might exist that makes the current 10g methodology obsolete.

 

[lukke]

By "future" I mean quality 10Gbit connection between home servers. I dont want to have in my ultra modern multimedia house 1Gbps till my end of life.

 

[bill001g]

Go for it then its your money. Just remember most people do not stay in the same house for more than 7 years.

You can never really predict technology who knows if ethernet will even be the optimum technology by then. It is highly likely something else will be used because of the limitations to throughput in ethernet. This is already seen in storage networks..and this really is the only area that comes close to needing huge data throughput.

 

[das_stig]

7 years, hmm 4 houses in 42 years of life ?
Yes Cat6 more expensive, but better shielding, probably last longer and who knows what bandwidth we will have in 10 years.

 

[dholster]

I recently debated this whole thing and looked at this way. Your network can be 10gbps all you want, but even top of the line ssd raid setups will only be able to read/write at about half that speed.

Cat 5e is pretty much capable of cat6 speeds, cat 6a is capable of 10g, and is considerably cheaper then anything past that.

I went with cat 6a on my network with standard gigabit switches and interfaces. for a few reasons, mainly cost and availability. I can achieve 1gbps between a few of my machines, but the majority of my devices either run at 10/100 or have mechanical hard drives that cant even come close to fully utilizing the speed.

Unless you plan on updating every device in your house to the latest and greatest the moment it is available, you will not see even the full potential of 1gbps Ethernet for a long long time. I recommend you save yourself some time and a lot of money and go with the Cat6

 

[cenpjas]

With current SSD drives pushing past 500Mbytes which is around a 50% improvement in about a year and a half, 4k tv's needing around 10gbs because you never get max bandwidth, going to be throwing stuff about your house I would lean towards cat 7a if there is only a few hundred pounds diffrence. I can always use sub spec (ie cheaper cat) heads and easly change them later if I need to save cash.

If I can not afford cat 7a, then yes cat 5e would be my other choice. Only if I had issues with interference would I look to maybe use some better shielded cable, or some out door cable if I'm running it down to the bottom of my garden.

I an a big fan of high end structured cabling especially with the issues you can suffer from wi-fi networks when there is high density. I can quite happly upgrade my wi-fi routers from n to ac with 1gbs backplanes to my gig switch where my nas' s sit. Of course if I had 7a installed, I can keep upgrading my switchs and routers with the newest affordable tech upto 40gbs per cable before I need to get inventive.

If you have a large property you can of course just put in some strategic 7a and do the rest in 5e, although the cost per point will not be as good as having everything done in one cable type.

 

[CubesTheGamer]

What do you mean "future". This is the same silly thing people did to put in cat6 rather than cat5e. Guess what the market went from 1g which runs fine on 5e directly to 10g which requires cat6a or cat7. All those people who thought they would "save" money in the future found out they wasted it. The now run 1g over their very expensive (at install time) cat6 cable and if they ever want to go faster will have to replace it just as if they had put in cat5e.

The question is do you really think that home machines will be able to actually use 10g even in the next 10yrs. If you look at what most people have even 1g is very much more than they can possibly use. You have to come up with very specialized conditions to even need more than 100m. Your average person likely uses less than 10m since all they to do is surf the internet.

So you need to be very good at predicting the future, by the time affordable 10g interface reach the consumer market and applications actually need to transfer that what other technology might exist that makes the current 10g methodology obsolete.

You sound like one of those people from the 1990s that thought 1GB of RAM was only going to be necessary in the year 2100.

 

[carpenterdave]

you are building the house, you have the unique option of doing things to help its flexibility that renovating or wiring after never has. Think beyond which cable to buy.

Have you considered running fiber along with the copper? Typically its not the material costs but the instillation costs that should be considered. Also - Think about designing the house for upgrade. Consider installing some plastic pipes n the real "back bone" runs between what might be server locations. Run at least one extra string n the pipe so you can pull through the new zippy wire/fiber on a few years.

Also consider making cable channels behind the floor molding. put a groove in the studs, and screw on the molding, then you an unscrew and change it or add/move later. Running cable along a groove rather than threading through holes is much easier. And along outside walls you don't need to fight the insulation. If the framing is already up or you can't intervene and cut the groove pre framing, then get a small router and do so after. Putting in a new port box and running cable to it up from the floor molding is easy.

 

[jsmithepa]

Just remember most people do not stay in the same house for more than 7 years.

If one builds his own house, the chances are, my money is on he's intending to stay there for a while, but of course there is no 100% in life.

Simple answer I add, if budget allows, go 7. The investor in me though is saying I am certainly am not buying in low.

 

[gsanmartin]

Bozons by the dozens! The best solution comes from a futurist (me): install shielded plastic or other conduit. If you guess wrong (because there is no shortage of bad advice on the internet), just pull the bad or outdated shit and pull the new good stuff (soon to be shit) with the string you just pulled through. Do not treat telecom wire like electrical wire. It is clearly not the same. It is not a 100 year investment and probably not even a 10 year investment (somewhat speculative but I am entitled). The ineptitude of a million bozos concentrated into a single individual = 1 bozon (rhymes with buzzons).

 

[Jamesbonds007]

Just spotted a house on rightmove which has CAT 7 10G network installed in a house

http://www.rightmove.co.uk/property-for-sale/property-40637616.html

 

[apesoccer]

Mmmmm...i smell the blood of math fails.

1 gbit = about 100MBytes
10 gbit = about 1GByte/second
1 SATA 6Gbit can* copy at 5.6gbits or 560MB/s
1 PCIE SSDs can* copy at 3.5GB/s or 35gbits.
A regular 5.4k 500GB hard drive can push 100MB/s
A regular 7.2k 500GB hard drive can push 150MB/s.
Newer regular 7.2k 2TB+ drives can* push closer to 200-220MB/s ea.
Hardware raid with large onboard RAM cache's coupled with SSD caches can sustain at whatever level it can be fed just about (not really, but kind of since we're talking about peak total bw rather then IOs)...
Software raids typically peg out at the peak of the total bw of the SATA ports it applies to (and most little intel setups with regular hd's you are going to see max 150MB/s, might see a little higher...but longer term sustained will be closer to 150 [you could see 1GB/s with the right/wrong unraid 0 setup...but who wants to fail at raid]).

So a 1gbit connection = fail for ssd's, or even regular hard drives if you want to be able to transfer at peak speeds. When i moved 10GB of data from my 250GB samsung pcie ssd to my 500GB samsung non-pcie ssd (with samsung RAM caching on...[typical max on it is 550MB/s]) i hit as high as 1GB/s during that transfer (again only because of the ram caching...normal high is 550MB/s). Again, 1GB/s = 10Gbit, so if you want to backup your pcie ssd to another backup device hourly (and thats full backups) which has caching to allow for faster transfers (as in high end backup server with raid and onboard caching, or ssd caching...), then yea you'd totally need it.

If you are running an Exchange email server with 250 people whom get 150 emails a day, mostly text based, and a half filled 1 TB of space on SSDs for your exchange db(s)...most organizations will not need 10gb. You will barely need 100mb internally and only 10mb externally (actual internet). Only for backups would you ever need more then 100mb, and thats assuming you needed to do a full backup or restore over a very short period. 10gb is nice, but not worth the cost until you get in to more Enterprise worthy setups most of the time. As a fellow nerd, is 10gb better? Yes always. Is it worth it? even in Enterprise org's, not usually. But its not the usual times that you buy it for, its for the emergencies when you need to restore data. (or if you are a highly specialized org that works on video's over a network connection, or something like FEA over networked servers, trying to pull back the completed data to individual workstations on a fairly regular basis...or running 10gb+ between core switches makes sense...etc).

ps - if you like that i replied to this year old thread, so i could soapbox this bitch in to shape, feel free to upvote. =P