Cable Length??

[XeliGamer]

Hi I'm wanting to know how long can a cable be before it starts to loose its connectivity?

for example a LAN cable at a length of 100m would it still be fine or does it need a booster in the middle?

will you still get the same speeds or will it be lagging behind?

[Cr33ps]

I searched it up and it seems like a lan cable is designed to go around 100m long before losing a lot of signal, It depends on the manufacturer though.

[XeliGamer]

Just now, Cr33ps said:

I searched it up and it seems like a lan cable is designed to go around 100m long before losing a lot of signal, It depends on the manufacturer though.

thanks so about a 100m would be max before it looses signal but if you wanted to go like 50m more would you need to connect up a switch? for boosting

[Cr33ps]

Just now, XeliGamer said:

thanks so about a 100m would be max before it looses signal but if you wanted to go like 50m more would you need to connect up a switch? for boosting

Yeah you would need something called a Ethernet repeater

[mariushm]

15 minutes ago, XeliGamer said:

Hi I'm wanting to know how long can a cable be before it starts to loose its connectivity?

for example a LAN cable at a length of 100m would it still be fine or does it need a booster in the middle?

will you still get the same speeds or will it be lagging behind?

The ethernet standard defines the maximum length of a cable to 100 meters PROVIDED CABLE MEETS THE SPECIFICATIONS of that standard. 

 

Any cat5e/cat6/cat6a cable made with pure copper wires should do 100 meters just fine. Cheaper ethernet cables are made with CCA wires (cca means copper coated aluminum / copper clad aluminum) which are basically aluminum wires coated with a very thin layer of copper - these wires are much cheaper to make because copper is expensive, but they have different electrical properties, higher resistance, so they can cause problems at long lengths. Most network cards and switches have no problems up to let's say 15-25 meters, but above that length, CCA cables can cause problems which are often fixed by disabling power saving modes in network cards, configuring them for extra transmission power and so on. 

 

cat5e is good for 1 gbps / 2.5 gbps up to 100 meters

cat6 is  same as cat5e , PLUS 5 gbps to 100 meters,  PLUS 10 gbps up to around 55 meters (in standard, in practice I'd say keep it less than 30-40 meters)

cat6a is better cat6 capable of 10gbps up to 100 meters.

 

If you want longer lengths, you need a device to receive the signal and repeat it / amplify it ... basically a NETWORK SWITCH. 

 

Alternatively, you use a media converter to convert from ethernet to FIBER and then you can have miles/kilometers of fiber wire. Cheapest media converters usually are limited to around 300 meters of fiber (with plain multimode fiber pair, really cheap fiber)

 

Signals travel very fast, the signal propagation delay is around  5 NANOseconds per meter ... so 100 meters of cable would cause 500 nanoseconds or 0.5 us (microseconds) or 1 / 2000 of a second delay.

 

 

[Oshino Shinobu]

Assuming we're talking copper twisted pair cabling here. Cat 5, 5e, 6 and 6a are all rated up to a maximum of 100m without signal degradation for their rated bandwidth. However, that doesn't take into account cross-talk or EMI, so in some situations, particularly with un-shielded cables, the distance may be less, or you'll see a reduction in bandwidth or consistency. They're also rated for different bandwidths, some rated for higher bandwidth over a shorter distance as @mariushmdetailed.

 

Cat 7/7a and 8 are kind of a thing, but Cat 7/7a isn't a TIA recognised standard and doesn't use the standard 8P8C connectors, and Cat 8 is designed specifically for short runs in datacentres so both can be ignored for the most part for the majority of use cases. 

 

13 minutes ago, mariushm said:

The ethernet standard defines the maximum length of a cable to 100 meters PROVIDED IT MEETS THE SPECIFICATIONS of that standard

Not sure how far we want to go down the technicality rabbit hole, but the ethernet standards themselves don't specify any maximum length as far as I know, it's down to the cable standard in use. Single mode fibre optic cables for example, can operate on the ethernet standards and max out in a matter of kilometres rather than metres.  

[suedseefrucht]

39 minutes ago, XeliGamer said:

a LAN cable at a length of 100m would it still be fine or does it need a booster in the middle?

Do you have a specific use case, we can help you with?

[XeliGamer]

26 minutes ago, mariushm said:

The ethernet standard defines the maximum length of a cable to 100 meters PROVIDED CABLE MEETS THE SPECIFICATIONS of that standard. 

 

Any cat5e/cat6/cat6a cable made with pure copper wires should do 100 meters just fine. Cheaper ethernet cables are made with CCA wires (cca means copper coated aluminum / copper clad aluminum) which are basically aluminum wires coated with a very thin layer of copper - these wires are much cheaper to make because copper is expensive, but they have different electrical properties, higher resistance, so they can cause problems at long lengths. Most network cards and switches have no problems up to let's say 15-25 meters, but above that length, CCA cables can cause problems which are often fixed by disabling power saving modes in network cards, configuring them for extra transmission power and so on. 

 

cat5e is good for 1 gbps / 2.5 gbps up to 100 meters

cat6 is  same as cat5e , PLUS 5 gbps to 100 meters,  PLUS 10 gbps up to around 55 meters (in standard, in practice I'd say keep it less than 30-40 meters)

cat6a is better cat6 capable of 10gbps up to 100 meters.

 

If you want longer lengths, you need a device to receive the signal and repeat it / amplify it ... basically a NETWORK SWITCH. 

 

Alternatively, you use a media converter to convert from ethernet to FIBER and then you can have miles/kilometers of fiber wire. Cheapest media converters usually are limited to around 300 meters of fiber (with plain multimode fiber pair, really cheap fiber)

 

Signals travel very fast, the signal propagation delay is around  5 NANOseconds per meter ... so 100 meters of cable would cause 500 nanoseconds or 0.5 us (microseconds) or 1 / 2000 of a second delay.

 

 

thanks for the information I will keep all that in mind, fiber would be the way to go if I wanted to go far with the cabling I'm using the cable for a town house

[XeliGamer]

33 minutes ago, Oshino Shinobu said:

Assuming we're talking copper twisted pair cabling here. Cat 5, 5e, 6 and 6a are all rated up to a maximum of 100m without signal degradation for their rated bandwidth. However, that doesn't take into account cross-talk or EMI, so in some situations, particularly with un-shielded cables, the distance may be less, or you'll see a reduction in bandwidth or consistency. They're also rated for different bandwidths, some rated for higher bandwidth over a shorter distance as @mariushmdetailed.

 

Cat 7/7a and 8 are kind of a thing, but Cat 7/7a isn't a TIA recognised standard and doesn't use the standard 8P8C connectors, and Cat 8 is designed specifically for short runs in datacentres so both can be ignored for the most part for the majority of use cases. 

 

Not sure how far we want to go down the technicality rabbit hole, but the ethernet standards themselves don't specify any maximum length as far as I know, it's down to the cable standard in use. Single mode fibre optic cables for example, can operate on the ethernet standards and max out in a matter of kilometres rather than metres.  

thanks for the info, the cable is your standard grey type unshielded I believe it is the twisted pair not sure its cat6 fiber would be the way to go as well

[suedseefrucht]

3 minutes ago, XeliGamer said:

I'm using the cable for a town house

With  multiple floors?
I would use at least 1 switch per floor and go to the different rooms from there.
The cables for the floors should go to the router or a switch if the router doesnt have enough ports.

 

[XeliGamer]

27 minutes ago, suedseefrucht said:

Do you have a specific use case, we can help you with?

so I'm using it in a town house but wanting to extend it to my neighbors house

[XeliGamer]

1 minute ago, suedseefrucht said:

With  multiple floors?
I would use at least 1 switch per floor and go to the different rooms from there.
The cables for the floors should go to the router or a switch if the router doesnt have enough ports.

 

yes it's a 2 floor house but wanting to extend over to my neighbors house, I'm thinking of maybe a router or switch router would maybe be a better option I think

[Oshino Shinobu]

Just now, XeliGamer said:

thanks for the info, the cable is your standard grey type unshielded I believe it is the twisted pair not sure its cat6 fiber would be the way to go as well

Cat6 is twisted pair, yes. Colour of the sheathing really doesn't have anything to do with the type of cable it is. Normally the type is written on the sheathing. Shielded cable is FTP or S/FTP, which has a foil around the switched pairs. 

 

[XeliGamer]

2 hours ago, Oshino Shinobu said:

Cat6 is twisted pair, yes. Colour of the sheathing really doesn't have anything to do with the type of cable it is. Normally the type is written on the sheathing. Shielded cable is FTP or S/FTP, which has a foil around the switched pairs. 

 

yes you are correct now the cable I have got is the twisted pair without the shielding just the cable inside with various colors

it says CAT6 24AWG/4PRS UTP CAT6 VERIFIED TO EIA/TIA 568B.2 & ISO

[tkitch]

okay so, here's a quick and dirty rundown:

 

Cat 5 / 6 (various types) of ethernet cables are technically spec'd to run 100M without a problem.

That being said, not all ethernet cables are the same.  It comes in 2 types:  Stranded and Solid Core

 

Solid Core:  Each of the 8 wires in your cable is a single continuous strand of copper. 

 

Stranded:  Each of the 8 wires is a collection of 12 (or more) super thin strands of copper wire.

 

Solid Core is by far the better choice for super long runs.  Anything past 75-100 FEET (25-30M) should not be stranded, it should be solid core.  When pushing the spec, always stick with Solid core.

 

Now is 100M a hard and fast limit?  No.  My office has some IDF runs that are 10-15M past that (solid core) and they work fine.  But if you're going past 75M on a single cable, do plenty of testing before you tie everything up, or you may have a bad time.  

 

Shielding is totally optional and not required, most buildings to not use shielded cables in walls, cuz it's annoying as shit to work with.  (And much more expensive)

[cmndr]

This is going to be an "it depends" thing.

USB 2.0 - ~20'
USB 3.0 10'
DisplayPort 2.0 and HDMI 2.1 7'
CAT6 ethernet - 100 meters (330') - though this could PROBABLY go longer
coax - RG59/U    750 ft (229 m)
coax - RG6/U    1,000 ft (305 m)
coax - RG11/U    1,500 ft (457 m)

Those are rules of thumbs as to where you need to start worrying about reliability if you don't have a repeater or amplifier of some sort.

As a rule of thumb, lower performance standards can get away with looser tolerances and longer lengths. There are very expensive cables out there that will work for longer distances. There are also fiber optic cables which work for VERY LONG distances for most of those standards.

 

21 hours ago, XeliGamer said:

so I'm using it in a town house but wanting to extend it to my neighbors house

Possibly illegal. Also be aware that if the houses are on separate grounding planes you're asking for BIG trouble (fire?) if there's ever a lightning strike or huge power surge if you're connecting copper/aluminum. For this you'd want to run fiber. No practical distance concerns and no worries about power surges.

Or do point to point wireless. That's the real solution. No digging or trenching.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/08/point-to-point-wi-fi-bridging-between-buildings-the-cheap-and-easy-way/

[mariushm]

Re discussion about lengths longer than 100 meters with ethernet cables :

 

It's possible to have longer lengths but you risk corrupted packets / dropped packets.  

There's various protocols which are used to transfer data between network card and remote device (another network card, switch, modem, router, whatever)

The most common ones are TCP and UDP. 

TCP is used where reliability is important, for example when accessing websites, downloading something. TCP has error checking and correction built in, and as you transfer something your network card sends acknowledgement packets to the other computer confirming the data packets have arrived correctly (when they were transferred correctly or when the error correction managed to fix the packet). If the data packet is corrupt and not fixable, the network card can request that packet to be re-sent. 

So if you're downloading something and a packet is corrupted, you would barely notice it, maybe you'd see the download speed drop from 1 MB/s to 0.9 MB/s for half a second or something like that, but you wouldn't lose information. 

So basically, these packet losses could result in random occasional inconsistencies, your transfer speeds would fluctuate, some small pictures on some websites may take a bit longer than others to pop up, and so on.

 

UDP is more raw, no error correction, no retransmission, if something comes and is corrupted, you just throw it away. The benefits is that it's lower latency, and can be "pushed" to multiple computers, saving bandwidth.

So it's used by video broadcasts where you don't care if a packet is corrupted - you'd see maybe a glitch on a frame or maybe some green block on the screen and at the next keyframe the decoder would recover... it's also used for audio telephony, for online multiplayer games, it can be used by torrent clients...

UDP is  used by some video games when you're playing multiplayer and this is where errors due to long cables could cause problems - let's say your game tries to send updates to the game server (your position in the map, if you're shooting or not, if you consumed some health potion or not) and that packet is corrupted because of the long length - the switch / router / modem will send the packet corrupted to the game server and the game server may simply drop it (ignore it), so the game will assume the old information is valid until your game sends another packet, which could be 10-50 ms later  ... in that meantime, some other player could shoot you and game server could kill you because it's not aware you used that health potion, or it's not away you moved or crouched behind a wall 

it works both ways, game server could send you updates about player positions in the map, events in the map (something destroyed, falling debris etc) and your game doesn't process it because of a corrupt packet, so you may see players lagging or snapping to some new position when your game receives an update packet later.

 

So this can happen if you go above 100 meters ... I've done 105-110 meters cables and had gigabit speed just fine, but had let's say 50-100 lost packets in a week or so of 24/7 usage so practically insignificant, but it's not 0.  It's sort of like modern ram, you may get 1 corrupted bit every 20-40 days or so, and that may or may not crash an application, and majority of people wouldn't care enough to get ECC ram for this reason.

 

This packet loss / corrupt packet can also happen with CCA cables, even less than 100 meters, because modern network cards auto adjust transmission power to save a few milliwatts of energy and the algorithms that do this adjustment often assume proper full copper wire is used, which has lower resistance, lower losses ... so with long cca cables, the transmission power may be so low that the signal can't be decoded easily at the other end.

 

---

 

As for connection between houses,  I agree that it would better to buy two media converters and then use a fiber cable between the houses, it would be a bit more expensive but much safer.

 

 

[dkoudijs]

On 2/8/2022 at 8:29 AM, XeliGamer said:

yes you are correct now the cable I have got is the twisted pair without the shielding just the cable inside with various colors

it says CAT6 24AWG/4PRS UTP CAT6 VERIFIED TO EIA/TIA 568B.2 & ISO

So its a cat6 cable, which yes you can run 100m without an issue. Howevr if you are running it outside, most cables are not rated for outdoor use.

UV light wears down the outer jacket real fast. Now in most cases you will be fine as long as the cable is not moved.

 

If you need to go furthur, as others have said fiber would be your best bet.

And please run a cable, not wireless since wireless can drop a signal so easily over larger distances.

Oh and what type of speeds are you hoping to get out of this? Internet? Local file server?

More curious then anything

[XeliGamer]

10 hours ago, dkoudijs said:

So its a cat6 cable, which yes you can run 100m without an issue. Howevr if you are running it outside, most cables are not rated for outdoor use.

UV light wears down the outer jacket real fast. Now in most cases you will be fine as long as the cable is not moved.

 

If you need to go furthur, as others have said fiber would be your best bet.

And please run a cable, not wireless since wireless can drop a signal so easily over larger distances.

Oh and what type of speeds are you hoping to get out of this? Internet? Local file server?

More curious then anything

I am gonna be using it for general internet access, yeah wireless isn't the way to go cable would be the best

[dkoudijs]

7 hours ago, XeliGamer said:

I am gonna be using it for general internet access, yeah wireless isn't the way to go cable would be the best

Ok then, the speed of the cable will be fine, as others have said you would need a repeater or a switch inline. I have used the following for long runs, and it works fine.

https://www.amazon.com/TRENDnet-Repeater-Amplifier-Ethernet-TPE-E100/dp/B00SDFF6S0/ref=sr_1_21?keywords=poe+extender&qid=1644935285&sr=8-21

 

You would need poe at your house side, and then this repeats the signal inline, to allow you to go 200m. I needed to power a camera at the other end, but you could get a device like this that just repeats the signal, and not the poe part. I was lucky my camera didn't need a heater, so worked out ok.

 

Look at the link, and the pictures explain how it works.