After seeing that my wireless speeds were much faster than the speeds I was getting over Ethernet, I decided to invest in some new cables. I didn’t know it before, but I saw while I was changing them out that my current cables were Cat 5e. While putting my network together, I had just been grabbing whatever cables I could find in my scrap drawers. Now I have Cat 8 cables and my speeds jumped from 7MB/s to an average of over 40MB/s. It’s a much bigger improvement than I expected, especially for such a small investment.
Cat8 is pointless with gigabit equipment as far as speed goes. Cat6 will do 10gig, you just had bad cables.
Yep. I’m running 1/1Gbps wan connection over cat5e just fine. Even on very noisy environment at work with a longish run (70+ meters) we ran pretty damn stable 1/1Gbps over good quality cat7.
I tried running a 1/1Gbps connection over Cat5e at home too, but for some reason, I couldn’t get it to connect properly. Ended up switching to Cat6, and it finally stabilized. I’m still scratching my head over why the Cat5e didn’t work as expected.
At work where cable runs are usually made by maintenance people the most common problem is poor termination. They often just crimp a connector instead of using patch panels/sockets and unwind too much of the cable before connector which causes all kinds of problems. With proper termination problems usually go away.
But it can be a ton of other stuff too. Good cable tester is pretty much essential to figure out what’s going on. I’m using 1st gen version of Pocketethernet and it’s been pretty handy, but there’s a ton of those available, just get something a bit better than a simple indicator with blinking leds which can only indicate if the cable isn’t completely broken.
Cat 5e
The fact that your old cable was cat5e has no bearing whatsoever on you getting shit speeds before changing cables. The gigabit spec was codified and products were on the market before the cat5e spec was ratified. Gigabit ethernet was literally made for standard cat5. I bet your previous cable was terminated incorrectly, and was only using two of the four pairs, limiting you to 100mbit.
Bingo!
Proper termination can be a bitch.
Orange white, orange
Green white, blue
Blue white, green
Brown white, brown
Learned it 20 years ago, never used it. how did I do?
yeah I did this almost 30 years ago and could recite it from scratch, haven’t made a cable since hs
You pass! I’ve done several thousands of these over the past decade.
Now do the A spec.
I have not cared about or terminated A-spec after network cards gained auto MDI/MDIX about 20 years ago.
