Hey I was wondering about this the other day, but what exactely is the speed in mbs that a regular lan cable has? like the speed at which information travels across it? The reason I ask is that we have base 10/100/1000 routers/cards/hubs/etc that are starting to come out and I'm curious as to whether or not current lan cables can take advantage of these speeds or not?

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Regular LAN or ethernet cables (UTP - Unshielded Twisted Pair) - come in various Categories usually maked as CAT-X (where X is a number from 1-5, which indicates a measure of its quality)... With the present equipment, the only grade of recommended wiring is CAT-5 which can carry singals upto a 100metres without needing an attenuator in between - at speeds of 100mbps and less. The so called twisting of cables is done to cross-out and minimize any sort of electrical interference that these cables might suffer. It's ALWAYS best to place your network cables at 90degrees to any electrical line you have.

As far as I know nothing below CAT-5 can sustain 100mbps speed over distances more than 10-15 metres... And as for 1000Mbps or Gigabit ethernet - its out of reach of normal copper cables - completely. Even CAT-10 (if it ever happens to be) physically cannot reach that speed. For attaining this speed, you'd have to fall back to FDDI or Fibre Optics cards and cables.

Just google for CAT-5 and you'd find plenty of information

 

 

 

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Hey just to point out that i do networking for companies and yes they all want the "fastest" so i will give u a shorter answer and 1 i know that works. Go out and buy CAT 6 cabling make sure u have gigabit network cards and ur switch or hub device is 10/100/1000 and you will be fine.

Cheers
Good luck lanning

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Dude - but CAT-6 is approximately two and half-times more the price of CAT-5 and isn't recommended for home users at all. Besides, even with CAT-6 you can at best attain 80% of the desired speed. I wouldn't ever rely on CAT-6 to run my Gigabit ethernet. Nothing short of Fibre Optic for that.

Besides, if your end-to-end distance is less than 50metres, then even CAT-5 can sustain near-gigabit speed without too much signal loss.

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Yeah Cat6 isn't that trustworthy and it's not recommended for homeusers. Also it's not called a LAN cable, it's technically called a Ethernet cable lol.


Gigabit networks are really for big enterprises, and it really depends on what you want to do, if you want to just surf the net with a couple of computers and a router, then you don't really need a gigabit network in your home, unless you like transfering big files between computers. For me, I use a gigabit network in my house because I transfer huge files between my computers in my house and also my HTPC, such as movies and such. I've set up a 100mbps network in my nephews house because thats good enough since all he do is just surf the net and chat.

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I was wondering where this topic had gone, sorry about placing this in the wrong forum M^E, I'll be more careful later on =S

Thanks for the info guys, I guess I'll be leaving the gigabyte networking stuff alone for now =/

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i agree

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I have set up a gigabit network in a small business. CAT-5 can handle the 1000 mbs speed, although CAT-5e is recommended. If you watch sites like dealmac.com or hot-deals.org, you can find 5 to 8 port gigagit switches for $30 to $40. On my network, I'm primarily mac. I'm seeing speeds of about 30 to 36 MBs yes not megabits but megabytes! Gigabit was definitely worth the switch.

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