Home Network Setup Which Cable to Use?

drnick · September 23, 2016

I just moved into a new house, the wifi does not reach upstairs to the family room and kitchen where people mostly will be. So I am planning on running a wire up there to add another router and just do a second wifi network. I figured seeing I'm running cable anyways, might as well wire it for the future. My fiance's dad is a trained electrician, so I can certainly save a lot on having the cable installed.

It was recommended to me that I should go with cat 6e for the install, but have been doing some research of my own and have found cat 7 cable for around the same price. (and 7a, but that was significantly more expensive because the only site I could find it marked up their prices a lot).

I understand that as of today I could easily get by using 5e cable and not notice the difference. But planning on staying here for a while, plus having up to date wiring for if we were to sell it is a consideration.

I'm leaning towards going with cat 7, where I can get 500ft for about $200. Which is reasonable.

I'd also like to set up a NAS, media server etc. so seeing in the last 10 years we've gone from 1080p to 4k, significantly increasing bandwidth. Who knows in 10 years will probably have 8k standards.

Just wanted to get people's thoughts on the cable that they would recommend. and possibly links to places to get it.

Oshino Shinobu · September 23, 2016

If there's no significant price difference between Cat 5e and Cat 7, use Cat 7. It's all backwards compatible, so there's no reason to not use Cat 7 if it's a reasonable price. It allows for 10GbE networking if it becomes affordable in the future.

We're already well on the way to 8K. Newer GPUs are coming out with DisplayPort 1.4 which has sufficient bandwidth for 8K.