Upgrade to cat6

[Flybywyre337]

Will upgrading from cat5 to cat6 improve my networks performance even though it is only 80mbps? Is cat6a worth a look? I don't have any distances longer than 10-15m other than the powerline wires.
Also, I read different information depending on where I look but is cat5e capable of 1000mbps or 100mbps just like cat 5?

 

[TheKingHK]

Short answer, no. You won't get a performance increase. However, if your LAN speed ever increases (above 100Mbps), then you'll need to get an upgrade as Ethernet (cat 5) will be your bottleneck.

info:

 

[Flybywyre337]

I get about 60mbps in the basement vs 80mbps upstairs by the router, so upgrading the cabling probly won't gain me the extra 20mbps? With the powerline adapters the advertised numbers were never accurate and I see a big improvement from a netgear 500mbps to a zytel spec-ed at 1800mbps despite only having the 80mbps internet which the netgear should be able to handle. Doesn't work that way with cabling? Thanks for the help.

 

[bill001g]

Cables always run at full speed. Your cable does not run 50m sometime and 100m others. The length does not matter it either runs at full speed or it fails completely if you go over he 100 meter limit. So if you had a 1g ethernet connection the data would flow between your PC and the router at the full 1g speed. It would then sit in a buffer in the router as it was sent over your slower internet connection.

The reason it is confusing is how the speeds are displayed to you. If you were to say send 1gbit of data for 1 second and then send 0bits/second for 9 seconds the average over 10seconds is 100mbit. This averaging is why you do not actually see your ethernet connection running at 100% and then 0% over and over. That is actually what it is doing though.