Cabling question / home network

Im studying for my Network+ exam right now, i reading the chapter about cables and topologies. Anyway i came across a table in the chapter with the different types of UTP cables. And it triggered my curiosity to check my own cables on my home network. I noticed that all my cables are UTP CAT5 cables.

The book says CAT5 cables have 100MHz max frequency and 100Mbps max bandwidth but are no longer recognized by the TIA/EIA.
CAT5e on the other hand is recognized by the TIA/EIA and have 100MHz max frequency and 1000Mbps max bandwidth.

Now my real question, if i change the cables to CAT5e will i see a noticeable increase in speed that will make the cable replacement worth the trouble and the money?

Find more posts tagged with

Comments

dynamik

Not likely. You'd also need decent quality gigabit switches, NICs, etc. What you have should be sufficient for streaming video, music, gaming, etc.

Psoasman

Cat 5e can supposedly run up to 1 GB, but I haven't seen it. You would have to invest in a lot of hardware. You could switch to Cat 6 instead.

RobertKaucher

Psoasman wrote: »

Cat 5e can supposedly run up to 1 GB, but I haven't seen it. You would have to invest in a lot of hardware. You could switch to Cat 6 instead.

I run gig on CAT5e at home and in the office.

keenon

i have seen at most 12mbps transmit on gig nics on windows based computers.. so gig or 100mbps your really not going to notice a big difference

snadam

keenon wrote: »

i have seen at most 12mbps transmit on gig nics on windows based computers.. so gig or 100mbps your really not going to notice a big difference

I must be lucky when I see I can get up to 25Mbps on my Gig network then

rwwest7

You'll notice an increase in speed when transfering large files. As for things like internet, you won't notice a thing.

Forsaken_GA

Psoasman wrote: »

Cat 5e can supposedly run up to 1 GB, but I haven't seen it. You would have to invest in a lot of hardware. You could switch to Cat 6 instead.

No, you just have to terminate your cable properly. We used to run cat5e from our access switches back to distribution (we run fiber now) and I could always tell who punched the cable down by the speeds I'd get over the trunk links. We had more than a few switches saturate the gig uplink (and these were not expensive hardware, just cisco 2950T's), to the point where we had to swap a 2970 in and run some PortChannel's in order to get more bandwidth to our servers.

The biggest holdup to your speed, assuming your backbone is cabled correctly, is going to be your operating system. We had one customer who had a windows server and was complaining about download speeds. We put a 500 meg file on a server on the port next to him. That machine was running Linux, and the download maxed out his pipe. He requested we reinstall his server with Linux. Same hardware, same switchport, no changes at all to hardware, and was then able to do the same on his server.