Cabling

Hi

There are 3 Standards
1- US Standards (ANSI and IEEE.)
2- International Standards (ISO).
3- European Standards (IEC)

It depend in your hardware specification if it support CAT 6 or not most vendor say that thier hardware support it.You have to have all componant do even the RJ45 Connection plug have to support it to get full CAt 6 standard level of support.

Category 5-Unshielded twisted pair with 100 ohm cable and associated connecting hardware whose transmission characteristics are specified up to 100 MHz. It is used by 10BASE-T, 100BASE-T4, and 100BASE-TX installations. The cable normally has four pairs of copper wire. Category 5 is the most popular cable used in new installations today.

Category 5e, Cat 5e, Enhanced Cat 5 - Category 5e is a new standard that will specify transmission performance that exceeds Cat 5. Cat 5e has improved specifications for NEXT, PSELFEXT, and Attenuation. Like Cat 5, it consists of unshielded twisted pair with 100 ohm impedanceand electrical characteristics supporting transmission at frequencies up to 100 MHz.
Category 6, Cat 6 - Category 6 is a proposed standard that aims to support transmission at frequencies up to 250 MHz over 100 ohm twisted pair.

In the otherhand fiber optic would be the best choise for Gigabit Ethernet to the Backbone.

I would go to sites which are specialyzed in cabling standards such as ANSI
http://www.ansi.org
or companies specialyzed in cabling and cabling accessories such as R&M which they gurantee CAT 6 standards.

http://www.rdm.com

Download from R&M
http://rdm.netrics.ch/381/629/630/664/683/686.asp

fluke
http://www.flukenetworks.com/us/Cabling/default.htm

Good luck

Mohamed

***Very Important NOTE *********
After you copy the URL a space or a %20 maybe gets inserted in the URL when you paste it into your browser. Delete any spaces or such characters from the URL for the page

Easy answer:
Cat 6 UTP cabling is better that Cat 5 and Cat 5e.

Bad news:
Maybe your system is not able to distinguish between this three different categories, but this is another story, and this not invalidate the fact that Cat 6 is better. If you can afford it use Cat 6. If your budget is limited use Cat 6 for the wiring and Cat 5 or Cat 5e for data jacks and patch panels (you may want to replace them in the near future, but you already have the wiring ready).

Jose P Mir
jpm@jpmir.net

I would rather comparing UTP Cat 5E and Cat 6 than Cat 5. UTP Cat 5 is almost and an obselete item and in fact the pricing is more or less the same and you may even find out that the UTP Cat 5 is slightly more expensive than UTP Cat 5E. Performance wise, UTP Cat 6 is superior that UTP Cat 5E for exanple max. bandwidth for UTP Cat 5 is 100 Mhz but UTP Cat 6 is 250 Mhz and like wise for other cable characteristics e.g. NEXT,ELFEXT, return Loss etc. Most important is the price for UTP Cat 6 is higher than UTP Cat 5E. I would say, currently the price different is about 20%-35%. Please also bear in mind that both UTP Cat 5E and 6 support Gigabit Ethernet - 1000BaseT LAN standard.

Whether to use UTP Cat 5E or 6, depends on 1)Budget 2)Investment plan (long or short term) 3)Design limitation e.g. distance.
For the workstation, if you are only looking at FastEthernet implementation and no future plan for GigabitEthernet, UTP Cat 5E would be a cost effective solution.
As for the backbone, if you are looking at a distance of less than 90m, both UTP Cat 5E and 6 could be deployed. However, I would recommend UTP Cat 6 instead of UTP Cat 5E. If the distance is more than 90m the choice is Fiber optic cable, Multimode or Singlemode - depending on the distance.