odinsdad

boulderer said:

Japhey said:

Why Cat 5 instead of 6 or 8? I only ask because I’m wiring my house this fall and the more knowledge I have, the better. 

I've just gone through this so allow me to share my knowledge.

Cat 8 is ludicrous overkill for any home or even office environment. It's really designed for connecting adjacent racks in data centres and is optimised for extreme speeds over short distances. It's very expensive, the range is not as good and it's unnecessary even for future proofing standards.

Cat 7 is a proprietary standard. Ignore it.

Cat 6 is faster (10gbps) than Cat 5e (1gbps) and is not prohibitively expensive. In reality using this is future proofing as it's unlikely you have internet that runs faster than 1gbps but to me it seemed worth doing. Cat 6a is the slightly newer standard which supposedly has lower crosstalk and I found it pretty much the same price as Cat 6 so I went for that.

Cat 5e is useful where you have really tight spaces because it is less rigid and more bendable than Cat 6. I've used this in a couple of places.

You can mix cables on your network fine (eg Cat 6 to run to a room, Cat 5 to run round a corner) although obviously the maximum throughput for any endpoint is going to be limited by the slowest point on the path from the router.

Two other tips:

- Crimping ethernet jacks is incredibly annoying and fiddly at first but then very satisfying when you get good at it.

- Think creatively about how to get your cables around. I struggled for a long time to get cable through my walls and floor from the front of my house to the back through a difficult spot - I ended up going outside and over the roof instead which was much simpler but not something which occurred to me for a long time!