CAT5E with 1G internet?

[tatsu666]

Hi everyone,

 

I recently moved in to my newly built townhouse and it's wired with CAT5E. I'm currently using Shaw's internet 600, and it handles the speed fine. But I'm thinking of upgrading to Telus' fiber 1G when my contract expires. If my network cable theoretical speed is ONLY up to 1G, should I replace them with CAT6?

[jaslion]

10 minutes ago, tatsu666 said:

Hi everyone,

 

I recently moved in to my newly built townhouse and it's wired with CAT5E. I'm currently using Shaw's internet 600, and it handles the speed fine. But I'm thinking of upgrading to Telus' fiber 1G when my contract expires. If my network cable theoretical speed is ONLY up to 1G, should I replace them with CAT6?

Not really needed since you will be at the ceiling of the max speed but still if you get 1gbps and your cables max speed is 1gbps then you will never go over the max rated speed that your cable can handle as the supplied internet is at the max speed and not over it.

That and 100% stable 1 gigabit internet rarely happens so you usually have a couple hundered megabit of fluctuation going on.

[Lurick]

Cat5e is rated for gigabit speeds and will pass traffic at gigabit without issue up to 100m* and can also handle 2.5Gb and 5Gb traffic at 100m and 30-70m respectively. Cable is not like wifi in that it can fluctuate in speeds, it will handle it or it won't negotiate to a specific speed (10/100/1000/2500/5000/etc). There are rare instances where other factors play into a cable negotiating a speed but it's not able to handle that speed but in, I would say 98% of cases, that's not going to happen. A damaged wire next to a large source of EMI can cause weird happenings but provided everything is wired and terminated correctly you'll get full use of your gigabit upgrade.

 

*Provided no damage to the cable, interference, etc.

[tatsu666]

Thanks for everyone's input, i really appreciate it. Reason i'm also considering is i'm thinking CAT5E could potentially max out its bandwidth on internet traffic itself, plus local traffic then it'll be more than 1G. I understand that situation may "rarely" happen.

[Lurick]

4 minutes ago, tatsu666 said:

Thanks for everyone's input, i really appreciate it. Reason i'm also considering is i'm thinking CAT5E could potentially max out its bandwidth on internet traffic itself, plus local traffic then it'll be more than 1G. I understand that situation may "rarely" happen.

A single cable will carry traffic in both directions at the same time and unless you have a device that doesn't support full duplex then it's going to send and receive at the same time and the limit is the interface speed not the cable.

If you have a switch and router your network looks like this:

 

Router---|

PC----Switch

PC-------|

PC-------|

 

Then local traffic is handled by the switch and each PC will get gigabit on their link to the switch but if all three of them access the internet or something on the router at the same time then the bottleneck is the gigabit interface on the switch connected to the router.

[akio123008]

8 minutes ago, tatsu666 said:

plus local traffic then it'll be more than 1G.

But if your equipment is gigabit, you can't go over 1G, even with cat6+ cabling. If you want more multi gigabit capacity you need multi-gigabit networking equipment. So as long as your switch doesn't do more than gigabit, you don't need to upgrade the cabling.

[Scheer]

50 minutes ago, tatsu666 said:

Thanks for everyone's input, i really appreciate it. Reason i'm also considering is i'm thinking CAT5E could potentially max out its bandwidth on internet traffic itself, plus local traffic then it'll be more than 1G. I understand that situation may "rarely" happen.

Cat5e and Cat6 are both 1gbps, Cat6 is just better with interference, but very unlikely you'd have enough interference in a home that Cat5e would have any problems. Cat6 is more for running dozens or hundreds of cables in a bundle, or running near high voltage/amperage power lines.

 

Cat6 does have a higher distance it can go for carrying 10gbps (~30m), but if you were going to replace the Cat5e with anything, just get Cat6a which is 10gbps for 100m.

 

If you want more than 1gbps to account for LAN and WAN your cost will increase dramatically. Its gone down a lot over the last few years, but you are still looking at a bare minimum of $130 for a 4 port Mikrotik switch, and each device will be ~$100 for two SFPs (if a DAC isn't long enough) and network card. Need more than 4 devices connected? I believe the next cheapest switch is the Unifi XG 16 port for $600.

[tatsu666]

From what I gather so far...it's not needed even if I up my internet to 1G speed eh?

[Scheer]

15 minutes ago, tatsu666 said:

From what I gather so far...it's not needed even if I up my internet to 1G speed eh?

Needed is subjective, if you want to download something from the internet at 1gbps, while downloading files from your NAS loaded with SSDs at 5gbps+, all day every day and absolutely cannot wait, then it would probably be worth it.

 

I feel like I'm a power user, have a full server rack in my basement with over a dozen VMs, SSD backup server, Plex server, NVR for IP cameras, etc... and I've never felt I NEED 10gbps LAN. Sure I want it, but its getting cheaper every year, so I'm just holding out for a bit. Worst case scenario backups and file transfers take a few minutes longer.

 

That being said, if you value your time at say $50 an hour, and it will save you 10 minutes a day... it would pay for itself in under a year.

[Alex Atkin UK]

8 hours ago, Scheer said:

Worst case scenario backups and file transfers take a few minutes longer.

Not quite, a good NAS HDD can do 2Gbit and obviously SSDs 5Gbit upwards.  That's more than a few minutes improvement on large files.  Although ethernet is a pretty horrible way to do backups anyway in my experience as its insanely slow at multiple small files compared to say USB directly to a HDD.