got cat5 all over my house but want to up to to cat8 as I'm getting a fibre connection, whats the process like and what should I buy to prep for it
changing ethernet cables
got cat5 all over my house but want to up to to cat8 as I'm getting a fibre connection, whats the process like and what should I buy to prep for it
>got cat5 all over my house
Good. You're done.
You're going to be able to push 1G or 2.5G over it without issue. You're not going to have 10G on consumer NICs.
You're done.
Thank you for posting this. 5e is so much cheaper than 6/7/8. I will never understand anyone who installs anything greater than cat5e in a residential building. What are you doing in your internal network that requires a 10Gbps transfer rate? What equipment do you have that has anything greater that a 1G NIC. I get the whole 'muh future proof' thing, but if that were the case, you'd install conduit at every outlet rather than fancy cable.
Additionally, gig speeds are pretty moronic for the consoomer. Picrel is the utilization graph for a 300mbps customer who uses their internet as a fairly average user. Streaming at 4k requires 8mbps, your vidya relies more on low latency than speed, no one cares that you steam and need the fastest upload possible (you don't) making symmetrical gig speeds in a residential moronic.
Copper in all forms is going to be on its way out in less than a decade. The future is fiber/wireless. If you're going to spend the money on 10G RJ45 equipment, you might as well make a full fiber network at that point.
If all your wall connections meet at a switch then you could maybe justify a better cable between that switch and your router/modem.
Just consider how much data you're probably going to be pushing between any two points at any given time. If you think you'll saturate the rating of cat5 then I'd consider if it's worth the money and effort for whatever theoretical throughput loss.
In what world is the cable inside your house the limiting factor for what you’re doing?
>I don't know the difference between Cat5 and Cat5e
If it's shitty, OG Cat5, it might "run" at 1Gb, but OP is going to have a frick ton of transmission errors.
>wellackshully5e
First, by the time homebuilders were pullingcat5, it was all e.
Second, even if it wasn't: were taking about signal runs of less than 100ft. It'll be fine. And if it retransmits occasionally? No big loss.
Third, even if it drops back to 100baseT? t's a home. The heaviest demand he's going to serve is video. It doesn't matter.
Never underestimate how cheap builders can be.
>Third, even if it drops back to 100baseT? t's a home. The heaviest demand he's going to serve is video. It doesn't matter.
Great idea, OP should just pay for a gigabit connection and only get 1/10 the speed. While I agree he's an idiot for wanting Cat8 in a residential setting, you have no idea what his use cases actually are.
>cat8
OP doesnt have a fricking clue
Next he will be buying ubiquity switches and a 19 inch rack to fill with raspis and nvx or whatever it is.
for money pit nonsense please.
cat6 is barely justifiable for home use outside of bragging rights (nobody is impressed btw)
If you are tearing your walls down might as well put fibre in if you think you need better than 5e (you dont)
This guy runs cable.
Also, to the homosexual who said you'd get transmission errors, twisted pair is twisted pair for a reason, and any error seen on a run shorter than 200ft are going to be at the transmitting ends from fricked hardware, unless you nick a wire with a nail or something.
Cat8 is way overkill for a home network right now.
But if you really insist, then here are some considerations:
Residential structured cabling is shit. Are you prepared to tear open your walls to do this job? I guess you might be able to pull using the old cable, but cat8 is shielded cabling and if you mechanically stress it too much you will damage the shielding. Never mind getting unlucky and discovering some idiot stapled your cat5 to the studs.
Cat8 is shielded, and so you need to use more care obeying the mechanical specifications of the cable while handling it, and more care terminating it to ensure the shielding is properly grounded.
The testing equipment to ensure the installation meets cat8 standards is going to be over $10,000. Obviously you can skip that to save money, but then you won't realize you fricked something up until a few years down the road when you actually try to install 40G equipment.
I'm not a low voltage electrician myself, but I've contracted them for several projects and we just use cat6. Who knows if 40GBASE-T is even going to be a thing in 10 years? Fibre networking equipment might end up cheaper/better, especially if passively split instead of having 48 ports of 40GBAST-T jacks, plus the jacks on the consumer device end.
buy the wire and then use the old wire to pull the new wire through the walls
next dumb question please
>buy the wire and then use the old wire to pull the new wire through the walls
what if the old wire is stapled to studs, or runs thru joists and around corners in the attic? no residential home is gonna be wired with cat cable in conduit where you can just easily pull new cable with the old.
>next dumb question please
your answer was dumber than the OPs question
Cat 8 is way overkill and pretty expensive to buy spools of honestly. My house had nothing installed when I moved in and I opted for cat 6a which can do up to 2.5G without issue. I only went for it because a spool was only like $15 more than 5e on monoprice.
It's your money OP, spend it on what you want, but even cat 7 is most likely overkill. We don't even run cat 7 in my data center at work. Either 6a or fiber.
doesn't matter you won't do it.
I’m literally running cat1 from my router, and I have no problems getting 1080p through it with no buffering. Ever. Run is about 45”
If anything, you’d run a single cat 8 (still way overkill) as a “trunk” line, from the ingress to the back of the house with a router at both ends, and the rest is cat 5 going to individual devices.
Of course, your old coax TV cable was good to 3GHz or so, somehow we convinced everyone to get on cat n(e) ++ inflation scam.
>I’m literally running cat1 from my router, and I have no problems getting 1080p through it with no buffering. Ever. Run is about 45”
>literally only rated to carry audio or other very small data streams
I don't believe you.
Even the shittiest chinkiest "$1 with free shipping" cat5 cables can carry 1080p no problem. They can't possibly make them any cheaper so they probably just rebrand cat5 as cat1 and call it a day.
I honestly tried to even find a cat1 cable, and literally the only thing I found that didn't have serial port connectors was some sketchy as frick listing on what I assume is the Indian version of Aliexpress.
I think cat1 cable is that old non twisted phone cable. there's no way he's running that on a modern network.
>dsl modems at each device in your house
It would work.
Cat1 guy here. Yeah, it’s telephone wire. Came with the house. The installer said it would be fine on the router they gave me. The computer ethernet is hooked up to the old telephone jack.
Maybe it’s a special router, it’s an actiontec brand.
Don’t forget the entire adsl line is telephone wire too, so maybe they use special drivers.
Based on that, I’m guessing there’s a high degree of needless CAT number inflation going on.
Big router doesn't want you to know how rock solid 100baset, even 10baset ethernet is. You van actually have multiple devices on the same link (cable) of 100 baset ethernet as long as you setup the TX and rx properly.
Hubs just made this easier to think about and the entire industry was so traumatized from troubleshooting other loop/multiple stations on one cable topologies that they pretended it wasn't capable of it for so long people forgot it.
And yes there's more than one way to push bits down copper pairs and you cam buy even like vdsl2 tx/rx equipment to get like a 200mbit link over 2 pairs on a small campus. It's rare because most everyone has switched to multimode or single mode fiber by now.
> hubs
99% of our problems involved going into the IDF closet and looking at the ‘collision’ LED for 30 seconds and splitting it into two segments if it stayed on too often. Also 100% complaint based.
Often it caught people doing insanely stupid shit, so we’s solve the real problem and put those idiots on a lantastic connection or something similar hence solving the problem except in cases where they were running c porn rings out of the office networks. Then they went away.
DSL works over a single pair of telephone wires, but uses a totally different (and more expensive) kind of technology to make it happen. It's also way, way slower than ethernet.
Since the labor makes up such a large portion of the cost of installing cables, it generally makes financial sense to install the "best" cables (within reason) the first time. Then you'll be good for 25 years.
99% of people will not need anything better than CAT6 for a long, long time. 1 gigabit is plenty of speed, and the short distance of cable runs in a home means that you'll be able to run 2.5 gbit, 5 gbit, and probably 10 gbit without replacing any cables.
Running DSL between campus buildings is such a hack, but I'm sure some places do it. There's not much excuse though, because the cost to install a 12 strand of single mode fiber is less than the wages of the network guys continually having to frick with the DSL.
Can cat8 be used to carry low bandwidth (up to 10 MB/s) data for way longer than it's rated? e.g. 500m
I suspect the answer is, "no one has any fricking idea since that's so outside the spec as to be dice roll."
If you really had to know, I'd say take a fresh spool of cable, terminate both ends, and test it with your $$$ Fluke. Obviously all spooled up like that won't be great for interference, but not like a 500m run won't also have problems with interference.
Oh, and make a YouTube short or TikTok or something of your test. Internet will eat that shit up.
tie the end of the new cable to the old one and pull the old one through.
Smart idea until you realize the cable was stabled.
What's the difference between cat5 and cat6 and all the other, more expensive cats that claim to have higher speeds? To my understanding they're all just 8 copper wires in a sometimes shielded jacket that carry signals from one ethernet port to another. My rudimentary electrical knowledge tells me they should basically be the same. Is it something to do with the insulation on the individual wires preventing interference?
It's a progression of gradually stricter manufacturing and installation standards, in order to guarantee a certain level of signal quality across the supported frequency bands. So not just speed, but also frequency range and interference (dropped or mangled packets).
It's very much to do with the interference properties of the cabling and how it's constructed. Not simply insulation and shielding, but also how the cable is wound to optimize the interference patterns inside.
The installation according to standards also matters. Too long and you will eventually fall outside the expected bandwidth/signal quality. Mechanically abuse the cable, and the conductors inside will shift out of optimal alignment. For shielded cabling, you can break the foil layers and ruin them.
Not really an electrical engineer, either. Just know some of it from selecting and installing cabling for projects. Like "don't strip or untwist more than the bare minimum of cable/conductors."
Even within a given category, there's a range of qualities depending on the brand. Like a good PoE-ready cat6 with thick wire gauges. And the fire/smoke resistance.
YSK that products which have 666 in the barcode number are made much better than the other products. Theyre healthier, and they taste much better. The packaging also contains depictions of religious symbolism. I suggest you go verify this fact for yourself, if you want to be caught up to speed on the state of our hellish existence.
I'm in your walls (installing Ethernet cables)
Big Show is installing ethernet cables in my walls again.
Cat cables are less conductors of electricity and more very long RF antennas, if that helps.
Cat5e UTP: 1GBASE-T up to 100m at 100MHz available bandwidth
Cat6 UTP: 10GBASE-T up to 100m (really 55m) at 250MHz available bandwidth
Cat8 STP: 40GBASE-T up to 100m (actual 30m) at 2GHz available bandwidth
The throughput has more to do with twist rate preventing cross talk between pairs more than anything else. The shielding in STP wire is to reduce EM induction currents caused by electric motors and other RF producing electronics commonly found in factory type settings.
Thats the gist of it.
You're going to use a fluke tester and see that your cat5(5e?) Can already support gigabit. If you really need 10GiB, you're going to use the cat5 to pull cat6e (not cat8, which is a fake made up thing) and push 10 GiB on that 6e.
Source: I build data centers
6a* not 6e
I know a guy who works at my ISP and asked if he could get me some cat8 cable. He laughed in my face and said it's not a real thing. OP we got tricked by clickbait articles again.
Category 8 was ratified by the TR43 working group under ANSI/TIA 568-C.2-1. It is defined up to 2000 MHz and only for distances up to 30 m or 36 m, depending on the patch cords used.
Category 8 cabling was designed primarily for data centers where distances between switches and servers are short and is not intended for general office cabling.
from the use case and cost and all aside, doesnt cat8 use a completely different connector? even if you just want to future proof, you should stick with cat7 max. we are looking at a big and slow transition phase when businesses will have to move over to cat8, obsoleting all of their old hardware
cat 8 is 40gbps what service even come close to that?
Real homies use single-mode fibre-optic cable.