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Hardware

Category 6 UTP Standard is (finally) Here 218

Posted by CmdrTaco from the just-after-I-wired-my-basement dept.
An anonymous reader writes "This is only important for the networkphiles out there, but the Category 6 UTP specification is finally here. The standard is the TIA/EIA-568-B.2-1. The significance of this is that now you can transmit at 250Mhz frequencies (vs 100Mhz of Cat 5/5e). So 1Gbps is easily achievable. Of course ther's still Category 7 (600Mhz) in development, but I guess we should eventually move to fiber." Who hasn't crimped cat-5 before?
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Category 6 UTP Standard is (finally) Here More

Category 6 UTP Standard is (finally) Here

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  • Compare the cost of copper and fiber... (Score:5, Informative)

    by Bonker ( 243350 ) on Saturday July 06, 2002 @10:40AM (#3832875)
    ...When you're wiring about 500 workstations and servers over a reasonably sized office. You run into having to buy literally *miles* of cable when you wire even a medium-sized IT office. At that volume, buying Cat6 or Cat5 is non-trivially less expensive than fiber.

    • Let's say, for the sake of stupid arguments, that the cost of fiber and cat5E for a decent sized network without any special needs is equal, even though they are not. And lets say that the cost to terminate both cables cost the same, even though they are not.

      An exercise for the readers. How much does a 100baseF network card cost compared to a 100baseT? How much does a 24-port 100baseF switch cost compared to 24-port 100baseT switch?

      Of course there is something to be said about pulling unterminated fiber at the same time as the cat5E for future use, but that's a different argument about future expansion/possibilities.

  • Fiber (Score:4, Funny)

    by URoRRuRRR ( 57117 ) on Saturday July 06, 2002 @10:41AM (#3832880) Journal
    but I guess we should eventually move to fiber

    Usually for me it's the other way around, Fiber gets me movin'.

  • Fiber? Not in my network (Score:5, Insightful)

    by div_2n ( 525075 ) on Saturday July 06, 2002 @10:43AM (#3832893)
    Unless you put your fiber cables in an unbendable channel, it isn't worth the hassle of having to replace a faulty cable because some bozo decided to fold the cable up and break the fiber. I have seen this happen many times.

    For the forseable future, gigabit to the desktop is more than 95% of users will need unless computing environments move to server-side VR operating systems that are fully streamed to a user with full motion and sound.

    Server back planes and clusters are two of the biggest bandwidth hogs that might possibly need something faster than gigabit ethernet.
    • For the forseable future, gigabit to the desktop is more than 95% of users will need unless computing environments move to server-side VR operating systems that are fully streamed to a user with full motion and sound.

      "No one will ever need more than 640k..."
      • Except this is several orders of magnitude different. Most officeworkers today don't even really need a 10Mbps connection, let alone an 100Mbps or 1Gbps (a very large percentage just browse the web and send email). So saying that 1Gbps will be enough for the forseeable future would be like saying in 1980 that 8 megs of RAM would be enough for the forseeable future -- and it was.
    • Fiber...man i'd hate to be the one splicing that network!
    • For the forseable future, gigabit to the desktop is more than 95% of users will need unless computing environments move to server-side VR operating systems that are fully streamed to a user with full motion and sound.
      DVDs output less than 10Mbps.
      Even without the super fancy compression,
      45Mbps is still sufficient for a Hi-def video stream. It's pretty hard to watch more than one
      video stream at a time, so most people won't even need over 100 Mbps.

      But although 100 Mbps may be all people need, they will still want more.
      Once bandwidth is cheap enough, we'll all keep everything on our personal servers.
      P2P piracy will take 30 seconds at Gig-e speeds, for a single film.
      Sharing my entire library would take hours.

      -- this is not a .sig
  • A friend of mine was running cat7 in building a few years ago.. odd? I never payed much attention to that at the time, since I assumed it was for real. what I want to know is why wer are still using TP when we have fiber available? we should be driving the price of fiber down, not TP. lets face it, TP can be prone to interference from strong sources, ect. Just my opinion..... If we drive the price of fiber down, maybee we can all get 3l33t fiber links in our homes :)
    • It wasn't cat-7. It was level-7 as proposed in Anixter's Levels Program. I believe it was 500MHz cable but the standard isn't finalized yet.

    • Re:I thought we had cat7 a few years back... (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      what I want to know is why wer are still using TP when we have fiber available?

      Doesn't the use of fiber cause the need for TP? Plus I'd hate to wipe my ass with glass...I'll stick to TP thanks
    • Except fiber is totally unsuitable for many applications, must be professionally installed, and the interfacing equipment is EXPENSIVE. I personally wouldn't want to run a fiber cable across my office, if someone trips on it.. SNAP, gotta pay the installers to come and lay a new cable. Whenever you run fiber you have to run a conduit as well so that the fiber isn't eaten by rats/bugs/mold/whatever.

      TP is honestly a better solution than fiber in 99.9% of applications. Only where the extra bandwidth is actually needed and the conditions are pristine enough is fiber really a "better" option. It's easy enough for anyone to install, it's fast, it's cheap, and it's durable (especially the plenum jacketed stuff.) What business owner is gonna say no to that just so he can say he has fiber, and thus a bigger penis than all the other business owners in the area? I don't think so.
    • what I want to know is why wer are still using TP when we have fiber available?

      Simple: money. Everything about fiber is more expensive than twisted pair. The switching, the network cards, the fiber itself, and (most importantly) the labor cost of installing it. I install cabling for a living, and my company charges for fiber installs about double what we charge for TP cable. Any monkey with a 110 punchdown can terminate a TP patch panel, but terminating fiber? Anything that requires a microscope is a pain in the ass.

  • 100Mbit vs. 1000Mbit? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Daniel_E ( 75554 ) on Saturday July 06, 2002 @10:43AM (#3832896) Homepage
    I was under the impression that the currently available solutions for 1000Mbit over copper worked just fine on Cat5 installations as long as the distance was kept short.

    If that is the case, what benefit does Cat6 bring to the table? More distance? Lower bit-error-rates? Something else?

    • Re:100Mbit vs. 1000Mbit? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Clue4All ( 580842 ) on Saturday July 06, 2002 @11:10AM (#3833000) Homepage
      Yes, it will increase the distance that gigabit copper can be run, as well as increase the signal-to-noise ratio. With gigabit switches starting to hit the market at decent prices now, I'd be very surprised if we saw slower hardware than that making use of Cat6.

    • Re:100Mbit vs. 1000Mbit? (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Cat5e was specified for 1gpbs over copper.
    • Gigabit ethernet has two copper variations. One of them runs fine on Cat5, but requires more expensive equipment. The other requires more expensive cable, but works fine on cheaper equipment.

      At least that's what I was told when I talked with a network integrator when gbit had just become available, and everyone and their mother was labeling Cat5 cable as Cat5+ or alike, to show that "It's compatible with the future standard that will be Cat6". And actually lots of the good quality Cat5 cable is good enough to pass for cheap Cat6, while the cheap Cat5 (that most buy when they see the price difference for ten spools) is barely better than Cat3...
  • Does Cat6 really have an advantage over the current network 100Mbit Network that I have at home. Should I buy the cables now now and upgrade to the 1Gbit nics later or should I wait for the prices to drop down?
  • Now that fiber is here, these advanced copper versions seem silly. The CAT7 standard, at 600MHz, could support up to 600x4 = 2.4Gbps, which is now much less than the 10x jumps we've been accustomed to in copper cabling. Although, I suppose it should be theoretically possible to create a standard that uses just one universal ground wire for a 600x7 = 4.2Gbps rate...
    • Until fiber prices and equipment come more within the reach of the masses, there will be a demand for copper, as long as there is a demand for copper there will be someone out there trying to make it better.
    • Now that fiber is here, these advanced copper versions seem silly

      Why does everyone keep talking like fiber is new? It was very available 20 years ago and didn't replace copper (which was 10Mbit/sec thicknet - try pulling a few hundred feet of *that*) then. It won't replace copper now, especially since copper is even more convenient, durable, and cross-compatible. They both will continue to be used where appropriate.

    • Re:Why? (Score:4, Informative)

      by GigsVT ( 208848 ) on Saturday July 06, 2002 @11:04AM (#3832968) Journal
      Although, I suppose it should be theoretically possible to create a standard that uses just one universal ground wire for a 600x7 = 4.2Gbps rate...

      Uh, last I checked, Ethernet is a balanced signal, there is no ground. This eliminates problems with ground potentials between two distantly seperated devices.

      It's basically like this
      Pair:
      TX+
      TX-

      Pair:
      RX+
      RX-

      High signal might be +5 and -5 on the other, in relation to some certain ground. There is no single point of reference per se, it's just the difference between the voltages. The same signal may appear to be +7 and -3 at the other side, but it doesn't matter that the ground potential is different, since the difference is the same.

      I think GB ethernet does something slightly more complex, but I believe that is a balanced system too. Coax is unbalanced, there is a ground on the sheath, hence you use a Bal-Un (Balun) (balanced to unbalanced) to convert between the two.

      Also your post is ignorant in other ways, you think we can only encode one bit per cycle? This is analog we are talking about here, things like QAM let you get several bits per cycle.
      • Also your post is ignorant in other ways, you think we can only encode one bit per cycle? This is analog we are talking about here, things like QAM let you get several bits per cycle.

        I think I should clarify this before someone comes along and blast me for bad phrasing. I mean that nothing is preventing us from using QAM or similar more advanced line codes in an analog fashion for ethernet applications. In fact several line codes are being developed for copper 10 Gbit.

        My point is that we aren't limited to one bit per cycle.

      • t's basically like this
        Pair:
        TX+
        TX-

        Pair:
        RX+
        RX-

        High signal might be +5 and -5 on the other, in relation to some certain ground.
        snip.

        There's no reason why a new standard could not be made to create a common voltage reference wire. I'm saying this because there was a standard that was created which allowed 100Mbps transmission over CAT3 wiring (it was called 100BaseT4), which is actually capable of up to 33MHz transmission. They used all 4 pairs of wires, each pair running at 25MHz in paralell to acheive the 100M rate.

        So,

        I figure there's no reason why we can't figure out something more complex, like a 1-wire reference. There would be alot of issues to work out, and it might even be impossible due to RFI issues in the wiring (that's why there's twisted pair)....

        And the parent is correct, QAM (Quadrature Modulation) could be used, which encodes two bits per cycle offset by an orthogonal 90-degree phase shift....though most likely an encoding method a-la Manchester would _need_ to be used in such a multiwire environment.

        Assuming the physics barriers could be overcome (and I'm not sure that they could), in theory, it could be possible to run 600x7x2 = 8.4Gbps over copper!

        • Re:Why? (Score:2, Interesting)

          by GigsVT ( 208848 )
          I figure there's no reason why we can't figure out something more complex, like a 1-wire reference.

          I think more pairs would be an interesting way to go, and still preserve the EFI immunity that TP offers. Just imagine a 50Gbit link made up of 5 cables running at 10Gbit, all transparent from software, implemented on the hardware level.

          Of course we have other hurdles to go before we need to worry about that, the PCI bus is running out of steam even for regular Gbit ethernet. 64bit PCI is backward compatible, but 64bit 66Mhz is not, and even then you are still only getting a 4X speed increase.

          Maybe someone will come out with an AGP network card, since that port is probably the highest bandwidth expansion interface a lot of computers have these days, and there is no need for a server to have a 3D card in it.

          • Re:Why? (Score:2)

            by fwr ( 69372 )
            Er, sounds like you're describing Etherchannel or a Multi-Link Trunk with those 5 cables. Why would you want to make a new cable standard with 40 pairs in it instead of just running five separate runs using standard 8 pair cables?
    • Price fiber vs copper installations with connectors and labor. The defacto standard Siecor Unicam connectors used by most fiber installers run around $9/each. For a large install, you're looking at a huge cost increase. For desktop installs with two ports, that's $72 just for connectors for one station! Panduit Cat 5E jacks on the other hand are about $3.50 each, so $14 for two ports in this case. Labor costs are also higher since it takes time to strip, clean, and terminate .. even with the Unicams. That isn't counting fiber trays and the higher cable costs for fiber vs copper. It just isn't practical for most companies except between closets or for special applications.

      Jason

  • URL won't work w/ Opera (Score:3)

    by nstrom ( 152310 ) on Saturday July 06, 2002 @10:49AM (#3832916)
    I get redirected to http://www.tiaonline.org/browser_error.cfm [tiaonline.org].

    Browser Requirement Error

    To view this site you need a browser capable of suppporting HTML 4 or higher.

    Download Microsoft Internet Explorer
    (recommended)

    OR

    Download Netscape Navigator
  • When it is 12:30 AM, you have 2 computers, Quake II, and a friend, you are near a Home Depot but you don't have the 25 bucks to buy a crimping tool, then manually driving down each contact with the end of a flathead screwdriver is about your last option... then at 2:30, you may begin... ah the memories.
    • I remember those days, but we did it the crude way... cut a patch cord in half and cross the pairs to make a crossover cable. then hope to hell one of us doesnt kick the cable :) but we were playing q1 with anchient ipx networking :)
    • I'm sure we've all "hacked" a cable together under less than ideal circumstances. Any bozo can crimp down plugs and punch down jacks (well, maybe not, but you have to be pretty clumsy or in a real hurry to botch the job).

      I remember having to wire something up when the power went out (no, not network cabling, more mundane stuff). Well, when the soldering iron got too cold to work anymore (no, I didn't have a battery powered one -- they weren't decent in those days), you start stripping the cables as usual, twist them, wrap them in solder, and use a match to secure the connection. A temporary hack, to be sure, but it worked for as long as it had to.

      I will say, that if you plan to do a lot of this, (and "a lot" can be "as little" as retrofitting structured wiring in a house"), get the proper tools: a Greenlee punch down tool for jacks and headend (usually comes with either a 66 or 110 blade -- you want the 110 but it's worth paying the US$15 or so for the other) at about US$45, a hand crimper for RJ45/RJ11/RJ14 (usually comes with a bunch of plugs) at about US$20, a coax wire stripper with RG6 and R59 settings at under US$10, and a decent RG6/RG59 coax crimper: around US$20. Surprisingly. Home Depot has all this stuff, including plugs, structured wallplates and jacks, Cat5e cable, etc. (Having the coax stuff is, less surprising). BTW, crimping cables, particularly RG6 coax connectors is hard on the hands -- do get a good tool.

      I retrofitted structured wiring to a house I bought a year ago. (You don't want to do this: putzing around in the attic, drilling through non-load bearing top-plates is double plus not fun -- I hired a guy who had network experience and did residential "cable" and "phone" cabling, but only had him help tie-wrap and pull cable -- it was stilla lot of work and definately a two-person job.)

      I pulled two Cat5e ant two RG6 cables to six drops, plus an attic "subdistribution area" (existing cable and telco drops terminated up there) from a headend which received the DSL line, POTS, dual LNBs pointed at two satellites, and a terrestrial SD/HD/analog TV antenna in the attic. There are breakout panels in the headend. So, that's 14 Cat5e jack terminations (headend side is punched down to 110 blocks), and 28 coax terminations, just for primary cabling. Then there's end-cables to crimp, terminating satellite lead-in (8 more coax connectors: one each end of four cables), satellite cross-connect cables (8 more!), and break-out panel to multiswitch cables (yet another 8). 7 cables (14 more coax connectors!) go from the multiswitch to the coax breakout panels. 7 Cat5E jumpers (14 RJ45 crimps) run from the firewall/router to the Cat5e breakout panel, and 7 punched down jacks on that panel to the 110 blocks. There are some odds and ends (line power inserters for the attic-located terrestrial antenna amp) as well. Oh, and if you do this, you will be making jack extention cables (two coax, two Cat5e, around 100 feet long), with four coax and four Cat5e crimps, for testing back to the headend when you suspect the cabling to a jack.

      The bottom line is that if you wire, retrofit structured wiring in a home, you will crimp and punch down so much, by the time you're done, you will be an expert. One upside is that you will almost never buy pre-made cables again: you'll just make your own, to length, as required. Oh, and if you run two cables, do get two spools, or you will go crazy running a cable, going back, running another, and so on. Yes, this means you will have two spools of leftover. Save it to make patch cables.

      In my case, I bought 2000 feet of Cat5e and 2000 feet of RG6 (the guys at Home Depot thought I was nuts, and BTW, RG6 on the spool gets heavy fast), and ended up using around 1500 feet of each in a 3200 square foot house. I got headend enclosures, patch panels, a multiswitch, diplexers, and misc. stuff from Home Tech [hometech.com] and satellite gear from American Satellite [americansatellite.com].

      • You make patch cables out of the same cable that you run through your house? While you might have gotten lots of experience crimping cables in doing your house, you obviously didn't do very much research. If you are going to lay semi-permanent cable through your house, you should be using solid-cored cable. First of all, it is less expensive than stranded cable, which is important since you're using it for long lengths. Secondly, the keystone jacks and punch-down blocks are designed to cut through the insulation into SOLID cable. On the other hand, the knives in the crimps for patch cable are designed to cut down into STRANDED cable. If you try to use one type of cable for the other's purpose, you can end up with poor connections at the crimps and the punch-down blocks.
        When I wire offices, I always make sure I have a spool of each type of wire.
        • I wired the house with solid core cable. My reference to Cat5e "patch" cables was in reference to 110 to 110 patches, not RJ45 to RJ45.

          Though, I have found that using solid core cable with RJ45 plugs designed for stranded cable works fine: the biggest issue is flexibility of the cable vs. that of stranded.

          • I see. There's a practical reason why it's unoptimal to do this, though.

            If you look at the knives in the ends of the RJ45, the ones that cut through the insulation, you'll see that for each conductor, it's a single knife that cuts through the middle of the wire.

            With stranded cable, this works perfectly, since the wire is soft and it cuts right into it.

            With solid cable, the knives rarely cut directly INTO the table, but instead just slice into the insulation and fall to the SIDE of the conductor. This leads to a relatively fragile electrical connection. The ends also fall off much more frequently.

            If you see how the knives are designed in 110 patches, you'll see that there are TWO of them, forming a v-shape that the conductor slides down into, cutting in on two sides, and wedging it there. Quite clever. Stranded cable has a tendency to be sliced completely in two by these knives, though.

  • Cat 5 crimpin' (Score:5, Funny)

    by Wiseazz ( 267052 ) on Saturday July 06, 2002 @10:51AM (#3832925)
    I worked for a medium-sized IT consulting firm. When we moved into a larger office space, they saved money by making everyone in the office make patch cables. Office Admin., everybody. Glad I was billable :)

    • I worked for a medium-sized IT consulting firm. When we moved into a larger office space, they saved money by making everyone in the office make patch cables. Office Admin., everybody. Glad I was billable :)

      This is irrational. The cost, in terms of time spent by employees, must have been much higher than if the cable were mass produced. It sounds more like somebody saved money on a purchasing budget but lost the company money overall.

      • Well, yes and no. Note his words "glad I was billable". Presumably these other employees had nothing better to do, so their cost would have been incurred anyway. Although when a company is eating an employee's costs, I can think of any variety of better things to do with skilled engineering talent than make them crimp cables, eh?

        C//
    • You know the failure rate for self crimped patch cables are somewhere between 30-70%, give or take 25%. :-D

  • This cable's going to be pricey. (Score:5, Funny)

    by acceleriter ( 231439 ) on Saturday July 06, 2002 @10:53AM (#3832928)
    So we plan to save money on Cat-6 by using two Cat-3 cables in parallel.

  • Who hasn't crimped cat-5 before? (Score:3, Funny)

    by g_bit ( 253703 ) on Saturday July 06, 2002 @10:56AM (#3832945) Journal
    Oooh, like anybody who's anybody's crimped network cable!

    And you're sooo sexy with that coil of ethernet slung over your shoulder like you're Tarzan or something...<giggle>

  • Morse code was invented eons ago and was one of the first communications methods which ran over copper (or maybe it was "hey Watson my pants are on fire!). We keep on trying to get faster and faster signals down a crappy medium. Why??? Fibre is a much better medium for transmitting data over much longer distances.

    I just wished the PC architecture would be able to keep up with the fibre transmission speeds. Copper in the PC vs fibre on the network and the bottleneck will always be the copper in the PC.

    My 0.02 worth...

    - .-- --- ... .-.. .. -.-. .
  • I actually SAW CAT6 on sale at Best Buy yesterday. $25 for 25ft.

    It's already commercially available and overpriced!

  • compusa has it (Score:3, Informative)

    by moosesocks ( 264553 ) on Saturday July 06, 2002 @11:09AM (#3832987) Homepage
    CompUSA is already advertising the cable in their circular for $25 in 7 feet quantities.

    Of course, it's probably going to be cheaper to crimp it yourself, but at over $3 per foot, it's quite expensive.

    • what kind of idiot goes to CompUSA to buy cable? you can buy a 1000 foot spool of cat6 for about $400 from black box, or you could buy 16 7-foot lengths from compusa.

      hmmm.... i wonder which is the better deal...

  • Well, its actually better to wire a connection than to crimp it. Aweful tiring though, and harder to do in the dark ;-)
  • I dont know much about networking, just the basics. Can anyone explain to me what does the frequency of the cable (cat 5 = 100MHz, cat 6 = 250 MHz) have to do with their respective top speed?

    It made sense to me cat 5 is 100 MHz since it's 100 Mbps, but then how does a 250MHz link able to transmit 1Gbps? If frequency has no bearing on link speed, then why is it important?
    • Ehh, okay. I may be speaking out my tush here, but bear with me. 100Mhz is the carrier signal. When you buy a wireless phone, what do you want? Higher frequency. Why? It's a little bit like sound in this respect. Higher frequency signals/noises travel easier and farther.

      *Takes off thinking cap* Hope that helps.

      -Dr. Stupid
      • >Higher frequency signals/noises travel easier and farther.

        No the opposite actually. The paralell capacitance and the serial impedace together for a low pass filter. So it's harder to send a high frequency signal down a wire.(this is why thay must improve the cable to do so) The bandwidth(efectivly the highest frequency that can be sent) however is nessesery for sending at a high bitrate. Imagine sending 101010101010101010 down the line. That whould basically create a square wave. The fundamental(the lowest frequency in a signal) whould be half the bitrate, the first(3rd. actually) harmonic whould be 3 times the fundamental and 1.5 times the bitrate with one third the voltage of the fundamental (such is the tao of the square wave) and so on. But not all of the harmonics are needed to get the data across. So in the end you get approx. the bitrate of the bandwidth(often bw. is used to mean bitrate) but it depends on the encoding method. This is why cables that can handle higher frequencies are needed.

      • ummm... no. On ethernet, there is no carrier signal, and the higher the frequency, the worse the propagation though cables, at 100 MHz the primary culprit is skin-effect, as you go higher, the primary source of loss is dielectric losses (like above 1GHz).

        Twisted pair is pretty good for transmitting high frequencies, but not great- I've measured cat-5 cable and about 130m of cable gives you about 10dB of loss at 16 MHz. The advantage of cat-5 over coax is that it is much cheaper and easier to terminate. You want to use higher frequency cables because it lets you get faster rise-times on your signal, so you can stuff more signal changes/second.

        For 100 Mbit ethernet, the *baud* (symbol) rate is 125 MBaud/s (and hence 125 MHz bandwidth)- it uses an encoding called 4B/5B to encode the clock into the data and only waste about 1/5th of the bandwidth. The *bit* rate is just 100 Mbits/s. 10 Mbit uses a much lossier way of encoding the clock and data, which sends about 20MHz of bandwidth down the wire. Gigabit Ethernet is also 125 Mbaud/s, but each symbol encodes more than one bit (it has 5 level signalling) and 4 channels (pairs) to transmit on. Plus they use 8B/10B encoding. Since it is still 125Mbaud/s, it still is within the same bandwidth as what 100 Mbit uses. It just uses it more efficiently. Of course, you don't get something for nothing, so you lose sensitivity in your reciever. The major gigabit ethernet PHY manufacturers all use DSP cores in their parts to achieve gigabit speeds.

    • Re:Question from a network newb (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Cat5 uses only four of the eight wires for data. Two of them are for sending and two are for receiving. Thus, 100 Mhz = 100 Mbps.

      CAT6 uses all eight wires. They also multiplex between sending and receiving. Adding the extra set of wires doubles the bandwidth, and multiplexing doubles again. Thus 250 Mhz * 4 = 1 Gbps.

    • 100 MHz is what the network cable is rated to be able to carry. Although Cat6 is rated at 250 MHz, it doesn't mean that it can't run at a lower MHz. Same with Cat 5. You can use Cat5 at a higher MHz than 100, but if you use it over 100 MHz, it probably won't be able to go 100 meters.

      I don't know how many MHz 100 or 1000 Mbits work at, but the main difference of Cat5 and Cat6 is that Cat6 is friendlier for signals.
  • It's about the cost of 5e plenum cable for the CAT6 pvc, so not a big increase.

    http://www.nextag.com/serv/main/buyer/OutPDir.js p? nxtg=199137_E6D466B508D4B90E&node=&otherForm=n&doS earch=y&advanced=n&searchnode=-1&search=cat6%20cab le

    Still, paying over $100 a roll is a little much. Hated to do that for the plenum work I did recently. However, we won't really SEE CAT 6 in installed facilities until the people making the bids for these things start spec'ing it out. It'll be a little while until that happens, as there are tons of proposals, RFP's and bids currently out for CAT5e.

    The big bargain will be the CAT5e testers that can't be upgraded/reprogrammed for CAT6 (although I can't imagine there's that much they couldn't be asked/reprogrammed to do. Hrm).

  • With Gigabit over Cat-5, and 10-Gbit in the works, that's as fast as I'll need to my workstations for a long long time. I certainly wouldn't recomend fiber to the workstation, unless you've got a hard shell on it, and your workstations are anchored to the desks! Fiber is far too fragile.

    For the backbone? Go fiber, of course!

    And servers? If you don't need the extremely high bandwidth, distances and reliability of fiber to your servers (or don't like the price tag), don't hesitate about going with copper.

    One thing I like to note about fiber v. copper...

    You need to get new copper cabling almost everytime the speed of the network increases. With fiber, the fiber doesn't change, just the lasers/LEDs at the ends. So, fiber is nice in that regard, but the fiber NICs/modules are still quite a bit more expensive than copper equivalent... Then again, more hubs and switches are needed with copper than fiber, so you save a little money that way, if you go with fiber.

    The advantages and disadvantages of each can even out. I'd say go with copper anywhere fiber is too fragile, and, if you aren't scared by the initial costs, go with fiber everywhere else.

    • A word for you ... (Score:3, Interesting)

      by AJWM ( 19027 )
      "Plastic".

      Sure, plastic fiber isn't optically as good as glass, but it's good enough for some things. The new 1394B spec, as I recall, goes to 3.2 Gbit over up to 50 meters of plastic fiber. And it's a lot less fragile than glass fiber.

      Plastic fiber to the workstation seems eminently practical.

  • "Any Day Now" (Score:2, Funny)

    by rf600r ( 236081 )
    I had this company trying to sell me a Cat6 or Cat7 install. When I busted him by reminding him that there was no such spec yet, He fumbled, insisting they'd comply to the standard which would be out "any day now." I told him if he ever tried to sell me a line of shit like that again, I'd thow him and his installers out immediately. This was 1996. I should track that dork down.
  • If we've got Cat6 now, and Cat7 on the horizon, this can only mean good things for Joe Average. I don't see a need to move to fiber optic cables. There are dangers and inconveniences such as laser exposure, fiber slivers in the skin or accidental ingestion, and proper disposal [ospmag.com]. Give me a crimper and some twisted pairs in a jacket, and I'll be happy no matter what the application for a long long time.
  • Stupid site...

    When I try to load the page, it loads fine, then quickly, the page is replaced with text that says "You must have an HTML 4 compatible browser", with links to IE and NS downloads.

    Sheesh. No respect.
  • The standard is the TIA/EIA-568-B.2-1

    Of course the rest of the world will use TIA/EIA-568-A.2-1. Isn't it only the USA that uses 568-B?

  • I has actually crimped before - but the interesting thing is the actual word. I mean, afaik there is such a verb 'to crimp' in English: but nowadays it exists in Hungarian in the same form 'krimpelni' which means only the act you do with the cable, nothing else.
  • A few years ago I purchased 1000' of CAT 5e rated at 350MHz for around $50 to install in my house. I guess the cable is at least as good as CAT6. It's a real pain in the butt for crimping connectors, though, since each twisted pair is bonded together (like a 2 conductor ribbon cable) and must be separated.

    -Aaron
    • Yep, Belden Datatwist .. I bought 40,000 feet of it for an install a few years ago. It at least doubles your install time and tests no better than the other 5e cables according to our meters. We did find that the stripper they provide is almost useless though. Take your dikes and cut between the pairs then use your fingers to pull them apart enough to terminate. I was glad to see that last roll be used up though!

      Jason
  • I just had my new house done in Cat 5e. Now I'll have to do it all again to stay 1337
  • I hope someone with gobs of real ethernet experience and know-how can post some meaty tech specs and info for the 99% of those of us here that only know the basics. I've run Cat5, I have a couple switches and an old hub. I know that Cat5e and Cat6 are better than Cat 5. But that's about all I know, aside from a few brief searches on Google for some gigabit info. Perhaps someone can clear up some of the many misconceptions, myths, and marketing BS by explaining the current state of ethernet in terms the average Slashdotter can understand and respect!?
  • According to this website [theheadwaters.com], Cat5e is 350MHz and designed for gigabit ethernet. What am I missing? Is Cat6 or 7 needed for gigabit?

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