I'm about to change the dining room floor and while at it thought I would run some Cat5e to where the TV / PS3 lives back to the router / slave PC in the hall cupboard. Is there any advantage on using Cat6? The rest of the house has been done in Cat5. I'd hate to do it then find I really need Cat6 in a year or so.
Cheers.
Only if you expect to use 10Gb ethernet!
You're unlikely to need/spot any difference between cat5e and cat6 anytime soon. And cat6 is more of a faff to cable up (thicker, larger minimum bend radius, etc).
Having said that as part of my rewire I'm using cat6, cos I never want to have to rewire again and it would be a shame to have to just because I wanted to save some pennies now.
Over short lengths you are unlikely to notice any difference. Over 100m you might.
How far do you think computers will change in 10 or 20 years?
NT
I'd always install the best possible cable available at the time because it's a pain to replace if you need to.
If you run the cable in conduit it should be pretty trivial to change the cable at a later date.
;-) far enough to not need Cat5 or Cat6! I don't think any network cabling you could have conceived of in 1990 would be in any way relevant today.
Cat6 doesn't seem to be taking over yet, but the incremental price difference isn't _that_ great - it's nothing compared with your time _now_, never mind the time involved in re-doing it when all decoration has been done.
I wonder if Cat6 might be even more versatile in the exotic non-IP- related uses of Cat5? e.g.
Cheers, David.
Actually, 10Mb Ethernet over cat3 cable was introduced in 1990 and the standard for cat5 cable was published in 1991 which will still work today with 10Mb, 100Mb or 1Gb Ethernet, and I can't see much pressure for 10Gb or 40Gb Ethernet in most businesses yet, let alone houses.
To be unrecognisable as computers, I would say.
You wont but a 'computer' and load 'software' on it.
You will have an appliance, with apps.
Most of which will be cloud based, not on the computer at all.
well I need 100GBps in my house RIGHT NOW
so if you have a spare 100GBps switch...
I can - I can usefully utilise 50% of a gig link pushing media files around (that's copying not streaming) *whilst* doing other stuff. My
802.11g WiFi can stream VCD quality media video at the expense of other activity.With HD this will get rapidly worse, especial as "media servers" (prebuilt and the likes of MythTV) are becoming more popular.
I would certainly run Cat6a now, unless conduit is installed.
10M ethernet over coax from about 85 would still be serviceable today. Maybe I should have been less vague on the time span, but point is there will be a period where some of todays standards are still usable, some not. OTOH there's far more cat5 installed than cat6, and that factor alone makes a difference to what remains viable.
Placing a few net cables in parallel costs next to nothing extra, and could prolong service further.
NT
Admittedly many businesses bundle together multiple 1Gb links because that's cheaper than using 10GbE links.
But I bet you're less keen to spend £500 to £1000 per NIC and several grand on a 10GbE switch ;-)
If you're really in that desperate need of bandwidth go for fibre and be done with!
Firstly I would suggest fibre more a realistic scenario than wire if you're looking at the next 5+ years of "future-proofing", especially when FTH becomes a reality. And.... with so many millions of miles of Cat5e throught the worlds offices I shouldn't wonder if technology will allow further mutations of what speeds and frequencies can be passed along plain old twisted wires at the same time to upgrade capacity without upgrading network, in the same way telephone wires have had an almost never ending lease of life through the decades. I remember when 14.4kbps from my US Robotic modem was considered the highest speed posible.
I can happily stream Full-blown HDTV from PC to Xbox-360 while only using a snippet of bandwidth. My other guess is that digital media will speed up through improved compression techniques and technology requiring LESS bandwidth than is currently needed. Certainly in a domestic capacity at least.
Hover all that's pretty pointless worrying about as there is no life beyond December 2012 anyway so worry about the now and don't waste time worrying about the what-if?s
;¬)
Pete
SM or MM? I wonder how far Intel has got with its 10G to the home stuff?
I remember less speed than that being available.
I doubt that, the current compression technology chucks stuff away and degrades the image. Compressing more will result in an even worse image.
Can you donate all your goods to me on at the end of 2012 then as you wont be needing them.
But in the same way is it was "impossible" to increase the capacity of a DVD until technology allowed more data to be stored on different layers of the same disc. Perhaps compression was the wrong term to use, what I ment was some form of simultaneus data transfer like diferent "colour" binary digits... Blue, Red, Green, 0s and 1s sort of like combination between DVD layers and multiple frequencies transmitted simultaneously....
Look me up in January 2013 and I'll see what we have left that hasn't been melted by excessive rediation. ;¬)
You wouldn't need single mode for such short distances. MM interfaces are a lot cheaper, too.
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