Cat5E V Cat6 for Dorm net

Hey guys,

I'll be flying out to uni next week and they told us to get an ethernet cable to use the net they provide
They only mention a RJ-45 port.

I grabbed a cable from a local computer store, with out really looking at it since it said ethernet -__-

Anyway now that I look at it more carefully I see that its a CAT6 cable. I usually get Cat5 cables.
I just want to make sure that this cable will be compatible with their net system and not cause any problems.

Hope you guys can tell me if cable is ok or should I go get a CAT5E one. The price difference is negligible so that isn't an issue.

Thanks

 

lol yes its compatible. CAT6 is actually better.

 

It doesn't really matter what cable you buy because you are limited to 100Mbps anyway. I don't think the school would have gigabit switch installed in the dorm. Just grab the cheapest one.

 

google has all you want to know about cat5 and cat6. immediate response too......

 

Over that short of a distance, it doesn't matter whether you use Cat6 or Cat5E. Only when you get up to over 15-20' does the difference between Cat5E and Cat6 matter. Otherwise they're both just 8 conductor ethernet cables.

 

Cat6 is also capable to 10gbase-tx (10 gigabit)

Cat6 also have thicker wire jackets and more twists per meter. More annoying to crimp.

 

just get cat5e
most backbone wont give you gigabit speeds

 

Thanks for the info guys
I got the difference through google, but I wasn't sure if it was backwards compatible

I've already bought the cable, so I'll just keep it, since I'm too lazy to return it

 

Tell me about it. I just wired in 12 drops of Cat6 into my house. Pain in the freakin' rear.

 

When we built I set up 24 'access drops' in the house (well, 20 in the house, 2 in the garage, 1 poolside, and 1 down at the lake) each with 3x cat6 and 2x rg6 plus provisions to run a future pair of mm fibers (toslink, fios, etc) to each drop.

Also ran a pair of 'dead' rg6 runs up into the attic with plenty of slack just in case we ever go with satellite.

I used about 8500 feet of cat6 and another 6000 feet of rg6. Everything is punched down and terminated (and lightning/overcurrent protected) to a nice set of surplus ADC patch panels and an 18/5 Channel Master HD distro amp.

Took a long day to run the cable with a friend. Took another week to terminate everything by myself. All the time trying to stay one step ahead of the sheet rock guys who, to their credit, didn't run a single screw into my fresh cabling.........

'Borrowed' the Fluke NetTool v2 from the wireheads at the office. That and a multi-strand toner/probe set are indispensable for this volume of work. Certified everything for GigE as well as PoE. Not that I have an application for PoE just yet. Remote security cameras poolside and lakeside?

Might never run the fiber though. Kramer Electronics has these neat audio/video trans coders that are real happy running signals over cat6.

Such as:

466N - Audio Only - Kramer Electronics

 

Yeah, I'm retrofitting some pretty old construction, so it was just what I could access while some of the sheetrock was down and we were rebuilding the framing for a partial remodel. Nothing too fancy, the house isn't big enough to need that kind of wiring. I just figured it'd be nice for me while we live there, and a decent selling point having a good coax and network drop in pretty much every room of the house. Just 7 rg6 (or rg59... I didn't remove old cable) drops, and 2-3 network jacks at each of those. And a couple RJ11 phone drops.

 

I dropped so much cat6 because I was planning to use that for pots if necessary. Snap a standard rj11 into an rj45 and it will use the center two pair just as though it was a 'regular' two pair pots drop. Didn't see any point in running dedicated two pair when cat6 was the same amount of work.

 

On the plus side, nails are more likely to "skip" Cat6 because it's so damn thick.

sidebar: Fixing un-conduited cat5 nail punctures is a real PITA.

 

I tacked in loads of nail plates over the through holes drilled in the studs and roughed in some 2x4 scrap to build some rough channels where bundles of cables came together.

A NetTool makes it very very easy to fix damaged cable. It has a built in reflectometer that will tell you, usually down to a 5cm resolution, where the break in a cable is. Very handy. If you have a toner/probe that is powerful/sensitive enough, you can use that to find cable breaks behind walls too. The probe will squeal when it's in the neighborhood of a cable break. The fluke toner/probe that is matched with the NetTool is sensitive enough for this kind of work too.

It is too bad the NetTool and matching toner/probe costs in the neighborhood of U$1k for the set. But then again, how many times am I likely to do this volume of work again? Never I hope.