Re: Cat-5e

["David Yeend" <david.yeend@xxxxxxxxx>]

Most Cat5e cable works to well above 100Mhz - it sounds good but in
reality
its just marketing.

In the days when it was established that something better than Cat5 was
required there were a lot of pre-standard Cat5e products designed to
350Mhz,
when the standard finally emerged it was specified to 100Mhz and that is
all
a 'proper' tester will test for. If I remember correctly it was something
to
do with the FCC definition of emissions from data cabling in terms of what
was and was not allowed. The actual spec. for Cat5e only defines
performance
upto 100Mhz and this is just fine for Gigabit.

Personally I'd ignore it when making a purchasing decision and go along the
lines of:

Is specified to EIA/TIA-568B?
Is it specified to Cat5e?
Does it fit with my budget?

There are many other considerations you could bring into this (probably one
of the more important ones in my opinion would be jacket material - and I
don't mean denim or Harris Tweed) but from my experiences the above is
typical.

I would stay away from really low cost cables that are copper coated steel
or aluminium. Although there is a lot with the TIA-568B Cat5e label there
are doubts over its suitability.

Other things I have found are that lower cost cables can snag easily and
have relatively high friction jacket materials. Also, some of it has memory
problems and can end up looking like you just deployed a run of razor wire
for security purposes.

Hope this helps.

Regards,

David

On 10/15/07, Chris Hunter <cjhunter@xxxxxxx> wrote:
>
>   looking again at the GigaBase 350 CAT5e cable (*), 'see they say
it's
> good for 350MHz & Gigabit Ethernet & other high speed
> applications ... and yet I thought Cat-5e was OK only up to
> 100MHz ... clearly, I'm missing something !
>
> Chris
>
> * GigaBase 350 CAT5e, 350MHz Bulk Cables - high-performance cable
> that's easy and economical to install. Cable is marked in 0.6 metre
> increments so you always know how much you have left - packaged on a
> spool in a convenient box for easy dispensing - ideal for voice,
> 10BASE-T, 4-/16-Mbps Token Ring, 100BASE-TX, 100-Mbps TP-PMD, E1, 155-
> Mbps ATM, 622-Mbps ATM, Gigabit Ethernet, and other high-speed
> applications
>
>


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