I am planning to connect my PC to the router using an ethernet cable. Length required is 10 metres. My broadband speed is 100 Mbps. Does it matter whether I buy a Cat 5e, Cat 6 or Cat 8 patch lead? Also, can I assume that for a new router and relatively new PC, RJ45 to RJ45 would work? All assistance appreciated.
Cat 5e will do 100M or 1G ethernet at those distances. Wired ethernet will work - better than a WiFi connection.
No, cat5 ill be fine ...
Thanks. One supplementary please: is a patch lead the same as an ethernet cable?
Plan for 1G in the future.
I wired our house over the years - starting in about 1997.
I only just got (nearly) 1G fibre.
True, I needed to change some of the hardware which was only 100M, but ripping out the wiring to replace with 1G capable would be a nightmare.
I'm not sure if there is a future of wired.
People say wired is better than wireless, and that was true in most circumstances, and is still true in some circumstances, but wireless is getting very impressive.
Cat5e *is* planning for 1Gbps (it will also work with 2.5Gbps and 5Gbps, though maybe not to the full 100m length, you can probably even get
10Gbps at up to 40m length).
At that length it doesn't matter at all. It's probably worth going to Cat6 in case you want it to work faster some time in the future. However I have lots of quite old Cat5e strung around the house and 30 metre plus lengths to outbuildings and it all 'just works' at 1000Mbs.
Yes
A patch lead is stranded cable with plugs already fitted, ethernet cable fitted in a building will have solid copper wires.
I could get 1GB, but why?
Oh dear.
Wifi cant do an unlimited number of 1GB peer to peer connections
+1. And punched down onto RJ45 sockets
This from a man who has a 100Mb/s LAN?
My point was that in the past, wireless was shit, it had slow speeds, poor range, high latency, and random disconnections. So you wanted every important device wired to the LAN.
Nowadays you can have many cooperating Wi-Fi access points in the home. In mine they are wired together, but I find myself not bothering to wire in new devices like TV/HTPCs.
Eventually I think the need for wires will disappear. So planning for the future is YAGNI.
For infrastructure like wiring up a house, I'd put in the best quality you can afford. The labour of installing it dwarfs a slightly higher outlay on materials. OTOH higher categories are more awkward to install (bend radii, shielding foil) so it isn't quite as cut and dried.
However for a random patch cable strung across the carpet there's not a great deal of point, because the labour to replace it is minimal so no need to buy a fancier thing which you may or may not want to upgrade later.
Also to note there's 'cat inflation' on places like Amazon - sellers are advertising cat7, cat8... At present there is no equipment that uses this in common use - almost everything for higher speeds uses fibre. So not much advantage to going that high, and it's quite possible their cables aren't actually tested to those specs (ie they're lying).
Theo
What a terrible suggestion
On 23 Feb 2024, Pancho wrote
I'm sure you're right, and agree wireless is getting very impressive, but (switches on "old guy mode"), I still feel happier when I've got cables running between stuff - internet, printer, keyboard, mouse - than when it's wireless.
The wired offerings might go like this. At some point, the cards either have modules that allow selecting wired or fibre, or it is fibre-module-only. The 10GbE is still a wired one.
100 BT <=== You can still occasionally find new kit with this! 1 GbE 2.5 GbE <=== RealTek, new build motherboards have this 10 GbE <=== AQuantic (Marvell) AQC107 wired output (addin card, or soldered to motherboard) 100 GbE <=== Used cards on Ebay or whatever 400 GbE <=== What your ISP has nowGenerally, you want a switch, a higher speed one, situated off a LAN port on the router. So even if your broadband rate was 100, the machines could connect at 1000 to each other (the GbE type).
100 100 1000 BB ---- router ----- switch --- \ --- \___ 4 ports, high speed between machines in the room --- / --- /When you get the whizzy fibre package, now the router needs to be better. You do that, so a single computer can use the entire link bandwidth (for the bandwidth test, to impress your friends). The switch could continue to be used. It really all depends on what exact rates come from the fibre (some providers pick nasty rates just to annoy you). Like making the ONT run at 1500 or 3000, is just meanness.
1000 1000 1000 Fibre ----- router ------ switch --- \ --- \___ 4 ports, also available as 8 port boxes --- / --- /The best fibre offered right now, is from Google in Kansas City, and uses a 20 Gbit/sec ONT module of some sort. We don't know what rate that really offers, as they only got the optics modules, to cover a "range" of broadband services. There may not be sufficient upstream bandwidth for that rate to be "real" in a sense.
If you were to put AQuantic cards in the four PCs, it is not the expense at the PC level that's interesting, it's the cost of the switch and who has silicon for that application. Once you get close to "commercial" bandwidth levels, the air is let out of your tyres. And of course, your friends will ask you why you think you need that (1250MB/sec).
1000 1000 10000 Fibre ----- router ------ switch ---- \ ---- \___ 4 ports (could easily be 500+ for switch) ---- / ---- /That's why some might opt for a cheaper setup.
1000 1000 1000 10000 Fibre ----- router ------ switch --------- PC - AQuantic ---+ High speed between --- | just two particular machines --- | 1250 MB/sec p2p --------- PC - AQuantic ---+Anything faster than that would be fun, but then the computer guts need to be more expensive, to get the slots for the hardware. There is one motherboard with seven x16 slots in it, but it might be 1200 or so, instead of the usual 200 for a home build.
The best wireless, is 60GHz WiGiG at 700MB/sec at a distance of about 10 feet or so. And no signal goes further than 25 feet, and the signal refuses to leave the room (whether the door frame is wood or metal). Wifi is already out of steam, compared to an AQC107 wired. The "other" Wifi, the heavily marketed stuff, is asymptotic and keeps offering people 100MB/sec in their room, no matter what new constellation they claim the latest one uses.
In an anechoic chamber, I bet the new Wifi is bloody amazing :-) When they have done testing like that, they use RF absorptive matting, because the signal is too strong otherwise.
This is 4096 QAM or a 32x32 I-Q display. The latest wireless might be max 1024 QAM. Using QAM is a diminishing return, as in an urban setting, the noise level is just too high to expect stuff like this to keep scaling. It's more fun to watch the dynamic display output showing one of the older (smaller) QAM matricies, as you watch the decision maker ("slicer") adjust for DC offset on the two axis, plus identify what the likely bit pattern is that some thing has transmitted. Denser schemes need DSP and error correction, to achieve a result. A Google search got me no videos (so I "must be using the wrong keyword"). The video of one of these, is much more interesting than a static display. It just doesn't get across the chaos in there :-)
Technology to the rescue I guess. But FSO was already done.
the release of the new IEEE 802.11bb standard is a big step forward. "
Like solid state lithium batteries I suppose.
Paul
Well if you want to go back to insecure congested local area networking, be my guest
I suggest you also study Shannon's law.
No way are you going to get gigabit speeds over the frequencies allocated for wifi.
I'm sure he isn't. There is a reasons people are installing fibre everywhere, not radios
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