Hi
I recently bought a building for our company HQ. It’s in total derelict condition, so we’re doing extensive renovations. Our architect advised that Cat6 cabling is a white elephant, whereas our cabling contractor is recommending it.
We’re a media company, so we do need to move around a lot of large files - images, video stuff and so on.
What’s the deal?
abby
I’m not surprised the cabling cojntractor wants to push CAT6…it costs more.
I am not sure you will notice much difference in performance on your network between the two types today. Certainly you will need better NICs in all PCs and better switches/routers.
That said cabling is usually considered a 10 year investment. If you are rehabbing the building anyway now may be the time to do it. Hard to say when CAT6 will become the norm but as with everything computers it only gets faster. I see a lot of CAT6 backbones these days (connections between the servers).
I have no doubt you can live with CAT5e cabling just fine for the next few years. Question is whether you want to pay a premium for it today or pay again in a few years to re-cable the place?
Bottom line is cost and what you are willing to pay. Both will work well. Just be sure if they do CAT6 cabling they use CAT6 testers and run CAT6 tests to verify the installation. CAT6 is less tolerant than CAT5e so the punch downs need to be better, bends need to be shallower and so on.
Thanks Whack-a-Mole, pretty much what I expected.
The cabling company said Cat6 is about a 20% increase on price from Cat5e. He also said that it does not make a lot of difference to him - he makes the same margin on either type of cabling - ie, he’s implying he’s not going to charge me more just cos it’s exotic (the job is about $20,000 for them).
I guess I’ll never know if that’s true, but if 20% a reasonable margin for Cat5 to Cat6?
Thanks for the tips on testing, they mentioned several times they have the gear and skills to do that.
Recabling this building (it’s heritage, you can’t begin to imagine…) once it has been renovated would be a nightmare, so I think I’ll go with cat6.
We’re getting new NICs and a switch this week (though with cat5e cabling in our currentl building), so we’re good there.
Thanks again.
abby
Let me state that more emphatically. You will not see a difference in performance. If you have 10mbit, 100mbit, or even gigabit ethernet, they will run at the same speed whether you have CAT5e or CAT6. In the future, however, there may be a networking standard that requires CAT6 at a minimum.
(disclaimer: there may be such a standard now, but if so, it’s some esoteric thing that you’d never put in your home anyway)
In fact, there is such a standard in the works. You will never see 10Gb eithernet over CAT 5, but it should be available over CAT6 in the next few years. If you’re moving huge chuncks of data over your network, I can see a migration to 10Gb in your future. (Note that I think the time is far, far away when a single server or workstation could truely stress a 10Gb link, but what you’ll see is that you’ll want “more than 1Gb”, and 10 is the next step up.)
-lv
Sorry for the double-post. While the network will run at the same speed on both types of cable, you may not get the same performance on both types of cable. CAT6 is better shielded, so theoretically you should get fewer packets dropped due to outside interference. Whether that’s a noticable amount depends on other factors, and you probably won’t see a difference in performance at today’s speeds, but you can’t make a blanket “you will never see a difference in performance” statement.
While that is technically true, I suspect that the difference is pretty tiny in all but the most contrived cases. How much interference do you have to subject a cat5e cable to before you start to trigger enough retransmissions to noticeably impact performance? It is my impression that on real-world ethernet segments, retransmission due to signal loss (as opposed to collisions) is close to negligible.