Cat 5e or 6?

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 Question by Raj Patel posted 13 May 2007
 Cat 5e or 6?
I'm remodeling my home and in the process am deciding to rewire phone and network. I am going to have 2 runs of cat5e (1phone, 1network), Is it worth it to upgrade 1 run to cat6 in order to get gigabit ethernet capabilities? I understand that you can use 5e for that, but since money really isn't the issue and i want to do everything right since i probably won't be rewiring anytime soon, should i upgrade the network wiring to cat6?
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 Answer by Dmitri Abaimov posted 15 May 2007
Dear Raj,

This may not be so much a money issue (residential cable runs tend to be short anyways) but rather common sense. Gigabit Ethernet would work over CAT5E just fine. I don't really know how applicable 10G Ethernet would be in your particular case (you may use it if you use heavy graphics, CAD or high resolution printing) but most people's bandwidth bottleneck is actually outside the house. The speed of your Internet connection is still commonly measured in single megabit per second and therefore, if bulk of your network usage is the Internet, you won't really see any difference at all if installing CAT6 as opposed to CAT5E.
Also consider that CAT6 cables are bulkier and more difficult to install that may have some hidden costs associated with it.

Good luck with your install!

Sincerely,
Dmitri Abaimov, RCDD

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