Cat5e v Cat6 install is it worth the difference in price?

Future compressions will be cleverer and more efficient. Just the way MPEG4 is better than MPEG2.

Chucking CPU power at the problem also permits better use of the existing standards. _without_ any extra loss of quality.

Just because the beeb think a new encoder is better than it is doesn't mean the problem is impossible.

Andy

Reply to
Andy Champ
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Now, yes. Later when they're dirt cheap, no...

Reply to
Tim Watts

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NO! NO! a thousand times NO!

The bandwidth of any communication channel - whether formed by CAT5, 6 or fiberoptic or radio waves or plain audio or whatever - is a physical limit of that channel (often expressed in MHz). No amount of jiggery pokery with the electronics, compression algorithm maths, frequency mixing, or any other deceptively clever compression scams, can increase the maximum physical bandwidth.

Anything else is the same as a scheme to beat the second law of thermodynamics. Otherwise known as squeezing blood out of a stone.

Yes many channels can be pushed beyond their stated specification - by top grade cable & kit + careful installation & testing - but once you have reached the real max that's your lot. Any attempt to push further inevitably loses information.

And, yes, most compression algorithms are a compromise between encoding speed and how much bandwidth (capacity) is left unutilised; so there can be scope to use faster processing to reduce wasted bandwidth in a channel but IMHO you will find it is a lot of work for not much gain over current compression techniques.

Also in the case of a lossy compression method, it is pretty certain that the encoding method will already be running near the maximum bandwidth. That is why information has to be lost.

As to cat5 v cat 6 as others have suggested: insert ducts into your new floor: make sure they can't get wet; these cables are unlikely to stay the course: at some time not too far ahead fiberoptic will almost certainly take over. Possibly the crunch point will be when cable distributed high speed public networks become available running at decent speeds >>100Mbps probably sweeping aside conventional radio & TV which will become internet services.

In chez nous cat6 was installed as there was minimal price difference compared with installation effort & there was the feint hope of it having a longer life. Cat6 also meant, I hoped, that if cabling wasn't perfect, cat5 performance would still be attained.

HTH

Reply to
jim

The information capacity of fibre or radio is a function of the frequency used. So, what is it that limits cat5 or cat6 then?

That should be fibreoptic, BTW.

Reply to
Tim Streater

Compression is all about reconstructing from the transmitted data what you EXPECT to be there. If the data is full of the unexpected, like sports, it wont compress too well.

However apart from camera cutaways, one video frame is very like another, so delta techniques work well. The downside is that it necessarily introduces delays..

Rediation?

Nivver erd of that guv!

your life will come to an end at the wrong end of a baseball bat wielded by a starving thug who has already finished looting Tescos, and now wants the contents of you fridge.

Reply to
The Natural Philosopher

feint hope? who are you kidding then?

Reply to
The Natural Philosopher

maximum voltage before the insulation breaks down and maximum distance before the tail end signal is swamped by the return transmitter...which is a function of the attenuation at the frequency of interest.

And of course, the chips driving it.

No sure where GaAs gives out but maybe 300GHz?

That means wire probably won't ever do more than 10 terabits/s.

At that sort of frequencies anyway, you are better off using a waveguide than wire, and once you do that, you find that fibre and light is probably cheaper.

Reply to
The Natural Philosopher

only

media

technology

I doubt it as well as "Full-blown HDTV" runs at > 1Gbps. Blue-ray runs at 40Mbps, hardly "a snippet of bandwidth" on a 100Mbps LAN. I guess the post might have Gigabit LAN but that requires kit either end of the link that can handle data at that rate. The link may well be running at 1Gbps but if the kit working flat out can only manage

200Mbps...

Just because broadcast "HD" telly uses

Reply to
Dave Liquorice

100GB/s??? Even if you mean 100Gb/s that's extremely fast and I'll bet all the kit is /very/ expensive. I didn't think you could even buy such hardware yet.
Reply to
Mark

I remember acoustic couplers.

I doubt it. The manufacturers need to keep selling you more shit so they will make sure that you need more and more bandwidth so that you must upgrade to their latest technology.

Is this the new date for the "end of the world" (tm)?

Reply to
Mark

Indeed. Attenuation.

But I'm not sure our-Jim-lad understood that, at least not from the way he phrased it.

Reply to
Tim Streater

Yes... but bury your cat5 /outside/ the conduit, as explained here:

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Reply to
Tabby

I note that a telephone channel is a raw 64k bit rate, ergo no modem could ever achieve more than that. Period.

Oh, indeed.

.I think its the Maya one.

Reply to
The Natural Philosopher

Sorry. 1 Gbps ;-) Brain turned to porridge again.

Reply to
The Natural Philosopher

Thanks guys for the interesting debates. However after reading this article about the pitfalls of Cat6 I'm not sure I even want to attempt it now.

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Reply to
RoundSquare

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for the link - I had read it before and was the reason I made the conclusion I did (it's a bit more of a faff, but I couldn't find it again this time!

However, I don't think this is necessarily a good reason _not_ to install Cat 6. If you make mistakes in cabling Cat 6 the worst that's going to happen is you wasted the difference in price by having nothing better than Cat5e, unless you end up doing something that would also have ruined cat5e!

Piers

Reply to
Piers Finlayson

I just about saturate my gig ethernet when doing backups. That is also about the limit of sustained disk throughput on the fileserver, so increasing network bandwidth would make no difference.

My networking is all Cat5e, installed about 10 years ago, but was only run at 10/100Mb at that time. Bumped up to 1Gb around 4 years ago.

Reply to
Andrew Gabriel

Exactly Andrew - you deployed at 100 and planned for 1000 and in 6 years upgraded to a gig.

My point was that if folks are usefully or very nearly usefully consuming a gig *now* it is a safe assumption (based on previous trends) that 1 gigbit/sec is going to seem lame in a few years time. Whether that is 3 years, 5 years or 10 years isn't clear and will depend very much on a person's habits but, although Cat6a is a bit harder to work with, it would be a wise consideration for anyone doing an install for the next decade's use :)

Reply to
Tim Watts

Can you tell us more?

I was thinking about installing some cat? to send AV over. I figure it would be easier to drop cat down oval conduit and attach a balun on the end, whereas s-video, hdmi, and scart would be too thick to drop down conduit and a nightmare to solder the plugs back on!

Where's good place to buy cat? cable from in smaller quantities. I'm not sure I really need hundreds of metres yet.

Is there any advantage using stp?

Reply to
Fred

ISTM you are confusing *bit rate* with *symbol rate*. Yes, the bandwidth of the system is finite and that constrains the symbol rate, but it does not place a theoretical limit on the information-carrying capacity (bit rate). Consider DTT transmissions, in which you can increase the bit-rate by a factor of 1.5 by changing from 16-QAM (4 bits-per-symbol) to 64-QAM (6 bits-per-symbol) modulation, without increasing the bandwidth at all.

The price you pay in using these higher-order modulation schemes is sensitivity to noise. 64-QAM modulation will fail at a lower level of added noise than 16-QAM will. But suggesting that the finite bandwidth of the channel places an upper limit of the information- carrying capacity of that channel (without saying anything about noise) is plain wrong.

Richard.

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Reply to
Richard Russell

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