The shorter the cable the more chance it has of doing fine at 10gbit. Although i think this channels has some issues with the used 10gbit network cards, because the cat6a and above should be able to reach 100m in length and still get to 10gbit. Seen it working in datacenters so should work at home. So something has to be wrong with his tests.
Nah, you don't put it in on a new build, you do 6 for home and 6a in some special commercial sites. But if you have it, you keep it. No need to change anything.
Don't forget, cat5e officially not supporting 10gbps over 30m is in a commercial environment, where you have a huge bundle of cables right next to each other, and cross talk between cables is more of an issue. With a single cable that's not even close to any other cables, of course it's going to work just fine. Think an office environment where a whole floor's worth of cables comes into one central wiring room - the bundle can have hundreds of cables in it.
I’d point out as I was a data tech installed millions miles of cable, where most of your tests on Cat6 and above where pretty much standard, I venture to say where the 5e would show weakness is when bundled with other many other cables with traffic on them the cross talk would severely reduce speed results as jitter and retransmits increase. That’s why in real word installations as in a commercial buildings, offices, collages, schools,and especially Hospitals we ran CAT6,7 or 8A. Where you have hundreds of cables in trays racks and plenums. In the average home CAT 5e would probably be ok, but, depending on connection quality, and the amount of RFI would make a difference, as in apartment with hundreds of devices nearby. You’d probably be surprised how much RF is flying around the average house. Think about it, every bluetooth, phone, laptop, wireless device, security, TV, routers.
I ran cable for more businesses than I can remember and never had a problem with Cat 5e, as long as the length was in spec and not run parallel to power cables. The majority of the buildings I worked in were not big enough to be more than double the max recommended length of a Cat 5e run. So, I never actually needed to run anything else. Similarly, the cable bundles rarely exceeded a couple dozen, in spite of most places having multiple runs to each desk/cubicle for VoIP and data. The fact is, the only time I even experienced crosstalk was on a literally severed (pots) analog phone line. If I never had a problem in all of those businesses, your average home user never will.
@@zgames9400….unless they’re trying to achieve 10Gbps…. I hazard a guess that the vast majority of your installations were 1gbps? Also, I get the feeling the cost of the cable is dwarfed by the labour cost, and so installing a higher spec cable gives a higher chance of success (ie the least chance of interference degrading the performance) and also future-proofing the infrastructure for the end user?
RFI/EM definetly going to degrade the signal .. more devices over a broader EM spectr degrade it exponetially ... its insane ppl dont know about EM/RFI and crosstalk .. separation and shielding is ur friend .. just measuring the cables with a simple oscilloscope and u get the picture .. its just insane how many times the solution is to just move one cable ...
So guys what's the right way to install S-FTP? Do we need to ground shield to get it work? Often interference in ground bus (especially if something powerful is grounded to make it worse than usual UTP.
@@nomars4827 well ground is ground, grounding won’t introduce noise, it will help reduce it. Only time grounding introduces noise is if you a ground loop where signal grounds are not end grounded, there for “ground loop”. Major issue in audio equipment.
I am using a Cat5 25m cable salvaged from a datacenter decommissioning to run 2.5Gb/s. It works great. That cable is over 25 years old. But I wouldn't trust it if it has to be use in the middle of a bundle of cable. I would have concerns about crosstalk. In such case I would use at least Cat5e FTP or STP (ie shielded) cables. I would use it as well as for short distance 10GbE (eg 30m) domestic applications. Our home are not datacenters.
it is 10G "rated" for 55m. about 150 feet. technically it's the standard that is tweaked so it can work on cat5e+ on shorter spans. would be nice to see the same test for 50m cable runs. and chained patchcables (chain via a coupler).
I've known this for many years. Well made Cat5e patch cables within a 100' and shorter are perfectly fine for server room connectivity up to 10GB. Plant infrastructure runs are a different story depending need for distance and grounding for outdoor installs etc. And frankly, any requirement to run 10GB or greater plant wide is an automatic fiber installation.
@@landpetjust wanna say i love how you take constructive criticism and feedback . I remember seeing comments about a suggestion in changing the length of the cables to be longer.
A fiber optic home network absolutely is affordable now. I have switched over to 10G fiber and got a switch for a $100, and used fiber NICs for $10. Long runs of fiber cable (50+ feet) were actually cheaper than ethernet when I did mine. The fiber cable is much nicer to run and much more slender. With the absurd power draw of 10G ethernet I don't know why anyone would choose that over fiber. Plus now I can easily upgrade to 40G or 100G when I want.
Yeah, but too much bending and the fiber is gone. This cable can (and will) work in that case, even if you cut half of the wires you can still make use of the cable. 😏
Maybe the results whould changed if the cables were put in a "electro-noisy" environment like a factory with machineries, electric motors, lights, etc. Yet, it's a very interesting test for the average home user !
I was going to make exactly this comment. Shielding would likely be required to still achieve good 10Gbps performance in an installation with other data and power cables.
Good video. The CAT cable rating includes the 100 meter (328 foot) edge case specification in a computer room with hundreds to thousands of other network cables running in parallel, causing interference with each other. So what you are measuring is just what can a 100Ft single cable in a low noise environment between 2 computers achieve. So it was interesting to see in your low noise environment test lab with 100 ft of CAT 5E you were still able to achieve almost 10Gb (approximately 1 Gigabyte per second) speed. That was better than I would have expected.
My house is wired with CAT 6. Glad to see it can do 10GBs. Even so, I prefer Cat 8 for all of my patch cables. My current network is 2.5 GB, happy to see I can do 10GB with my existing cable.
As someone who installs internet, I would like to see a video on whether there is any noticeable difference between 500MB vs 5GB for home use. I don't know of any websites that can even provide a single user those kind of speeds. Maybe if you had a peer to peer with both having the same speeds. The only benefit to multi gig speeds is for the ISP to make more money. If anyone thinks there is a video game server that has the capacity to provide upload speeds at 5GB to a single user to download a game, they are nuts. Just because you can speed test 5GB, doesn't mean you can actually use it. If customers were actually using the gig speeds they were paying for, the ISP would be overwhelmed. They purposely oversell the capacity, knowing that no one is actually using anywhere near the speeds they are paying for. We have been using existing cat5e for our 5gig service for the past couple of years with no issues.
While no one device is likely to use more than ~500Mbps in my experience, the benefit to multi-gig Internet comes when you have multiple devices and multiple users. If you're trying to grab a 100GB Xbox game while the kid is downloading a game to *their* console, and the wife is trying to stream an AppleTV+ show at 4K HDR with Atmos at ~45Mbps... you'll be happy to have 1Gbps service, and may even see value from more than that. Another use case is cloud backup. There are cloud backup providers that can sustain multi-gigabit uploads, and it's perfectly possible for a modern computer with a 2.5Gbps Ethernet card to saturate its connection dumping the contents of an nVME SSD. That assumes, of course, that you have a router that can push multi-gigabit speeds without slowdown, multi-gigabit switches that operate at wire speed, and wired connections to your devices. For most people, who only use WiFi with one router tucked in a closet (meaning WiFi 6 speeds at best), there's little point in going over 500Mbps.
A 4K stream is likely the most a single device will use at a house and that is usually 20-25MB (25 MB) for apple tv. That means that you could have four 4K streams going and you're still only using 100MB. You'd be lucky if a video game server was providing you a connection at even 50MB. A house full of people would have a hard time consuming even 200MB regardless of the quality of their router or whether they are using wifi or hardwire. Once you have about 500MB to your house, you would want to start paying attention to the latency numbers and whether you have symmetrical upload to get improvements in usability
We have the option for 1,2,5GB and I could not imagine a usage case of 5GB that isn’t blatant copyright violation or website/business usage. Even full 2GB would be pushing into those usage cases. 1GB is right there on the edge of not being enough. Steam, Google and Xbox can get pretty close to maxing out regularly. I have 24/7 file sharing server running from my house and I still find it hard to justify paying for more than 1GB, just because of my own storage bandwidth and limits of other users that are connecting. I get about 8-10TB of bandwidth usage a month.
Usually anything over 1 Gbps is connected to local storage that you need high speed access to. Video or large photo editing, database projects, etc. There are probably very few use cases in which someone would rely on an ISP to download or upload to a single server/service at greater than 1 Gbps. Those are probably branch offices of a business at that point. I could be wrong, but my family gets by just fine on less than 100 Mbps down. The painful part is the 5-30 Mbps upload for high resolution photos to backup services!
Wow. thank you for this! Conclusion : under 30 meters (100 ft) there's absolutely no point in buying the more expensive ethernet cables. Even Cat5e is very close to Cat6 performance, reaching almost 10 Gbps! And everything else above is not better. Incredible!
As someone who ran a lot of Cat 5e professionally, the only time you will see an advantage to newer categories of Ethernet cable is when you try to exceed the recommended specs for the cable. The only way Cat 5e will not have identical results to the other cables in a speed test is if the cable is damaged or you otherwise failed to keep ideal/identical test conditions. You should never experience even one lost packet over Ethernet on a LAN, unless you have done something you shouldn't. In other words, as long as your cable is certified to be within spec, isn't damaged and doesn't have interference overwhelming the shielding, you can expect the cable to perform at 100% perfection until it rots.
Someone tried to exceed 100 m by too much and I saw the test results. What you fail on first is total resistance. They tried 150 m with half being a good quality cat 6 and the other half, elevator ribbon. One worked, the other one did not. Had to add a repeater in the middle. And that was at 100 Mbit.
When I built my house in 1993, I ran Cat3 to each room. Still using it with 0 errors at Gigabit speeds. I'm not recommending it for new installs, but for short runs, it does seem to work just fine. New runs are all Cat5
I'm running Cat 6e for several very important, vital, and utterly critical reasons: * It was one of the cheapest cables in the hardware store. * It came at the right length - the 5s were either 30cm or 30m; this was 2m. * The cable was slightly narrower and less of a pain to work with. * The boot on the plugs ensured that it will never, ever turn into one of those classic Cat 5 snap-off grappling hooks. Speeds're fine.
I'm not a pro here, but the cat categories haven't have much to do with transfer speed, though bandwidth and sped rating is different, but with resistance against interference. I'm replaced old Cat5e with Cat7, which do have a good shielding and my problems with performance completely disappeared. I think I have too many cables under the table (2 workstations, laptop station, RPi home server,...) and there was an interference.
Just a quick question. Were the cables stretched out to the full 100 feet or were they left in a coil? Would love to see if there is a difference. Being in a coil can cause cross talk/interference.
Funny thing, most places here in the USA switched to Cat 5/5e cable for POTS lines because it is cheaper than running multiple runs of the old phone cable. Since you only need a single twisted pair to act as a line, a Cat 5/5e cable can carry 4 phone lines. This usually translates to either 4 RJ11 or 2 RJ12 cable outlets for actually connecting a phone. The added benefit is that you can easily convert them to data cables, when you switch to VoIP, which is what most businesses did over a decade ago. Most individuals have switched to cell phones. So, it's really getting rare to see anything older than Cat 5 in someone's walls.
Wow! I was about to spend a good penny on running cat 6 cables in my house. I had my house built in 2009 and it was wired with cat 5e. Time to rethink. Thanks for the test.
Just a thought, t If still coiled up the effect of external interference is minimized. Stretch it out run it near fluorescent lights, amplifiers, electric motors, throw in a thunderstorm…. Still interesting the wire type itself isn’t an issue.
I've uncoiled for other tests and it has made a difference in a case or two but these things can reach 10Gbps coiled so I just left them coiled. I haven't though about any interference
It should also be noted in order to get speeds of that nature you also need supporting routers, switches, and ethernet ports/cards to support the same speed as the cables.
I have switched over to 10G fiber and it absolutely is affordable. You can get a switch for a $100, and used fiber NICs for $10. Long runs of fiber cable (50+ feet) were actually cheaper than ethernet when I did mine. The cable is no much nicer to run and much more slender. With the absurd power draw of 10G ethernet I don't know why anyone would choose that over fiber.
Now test different brands of CAT5E. I roll my own, so I wonder if there’s also a difference in performance between the pin out on the cable and whether you’d see a difference between T568A and T568B.
An interesting test is to do this all again without the switch in the middle. Direct single cable between two 10gb machines running your tool or iprf udp and see the difference.
Dude, as it was mentioned before in previous videos, packet loss and connection stability is a major thing to test. Speed only by itself during a short test doesn't matter much. Still kudos for the tests, nice that someone actually tested Ethernet speeds with different types of cables and at different lengths. 👍
How can you test for anything if you first don't test the cable for max speed in the best conditions? ...It literally the foundation of all tests after that.
That’s pretty amazing. I was contemplating upgrading my older cables 5e, but not really sure I need to now. They are all under 30 meters easily. Thank you for this comparison
The thing is that all those cables are just twisted copper wires to connect two equipment together the main thing is the wire gauge and whether it's shielded or not plus the isolation.
Hi - thanks for doing the work. Oddly, I just watched your video of testing with shorter cables and wrote a comment. This was a better test and more interesting to watch. Thank you.
I usually make up my network cables using 568B standard. I'd be interested to see if an incorrectly made up cable would affect the speed. ie not swapping the blue and green pairs in the plugs.
When I was remodeling my house, there was a deal on CAT6 from Monoprice that made it cheaper than 5e at the time, so I wired up my whole house. A couple years ago I upgraded from 2.5Gbps to 10Gbps and saw full speed on my transfers. That said, I haven't tested all 43 runs... The odds that none of them have a nail, acrew, or kink... not great. 😂
Looks like it dont matter. From what I understand the noise shielding, and casing for uv resistance, and burial is what's different between them. I could be mistaken.
The maximum from spec is 100m? Or less? I will have to make something like 80m long 200-300Mbit/s internet connection, outside and I looking for right cable/technology to do it. What's you recommend?
That is a breath of fresh air. Twenty years ago, during remodeling, I wired the house with CAT5e. The official spec is 100 Mbps. I recently found that Xfinity (Comcast) was charging me for a 1200 Mpbs service. I called and asked to instead cut the service to 200 Mbps on the theory that it is pointless to pay for a speed that the wiring can't support. I have noticed more buffering at the start of streaming but in use interruptions are rare. Most of the connected hardware is Gigabit rated. It is good to know that my installed wiring isn't completely obsolete. At some point I may upgrade to the next speed tier for the cable connection.
Use fiber installations inhouse, works till 1 TBit without problems. 🤦♂️🙄 Not use "theoretical problems", tested it self. 😮 My neighbor use length over 100 m for 1 GBit network shielded cat 7 cable since near 8 years - just one problem - the first switch goes to 120 meter mark - +40 meter more do not work. 😂 Okay, technically this are both difference houses - just a UTP-cable between arrived at box and switch - never a problem! [Theoretical maximum length 100 meter between 2 switches]
I did the same 20 years ago but can't get more than 100mbits on my cat 5e and I can't figure out why. Even for runs 30 feet. Wonder if it could be my endpoint in wall connectors?
@@jessejames586yes the terminations may be the issue. Fast Ethernet (100 Mbps) only uses four wires, while gigabit uses all eight. It's common for there to be some fault that allows linking up at lower speeds but prevents gig from working.
@@jessejames586 Possibly. I personally installed all the end point connections myself at the time of installation. The wire I am posting this comment on is about 100' from the 16-port switch. Also, are you sure all the connected equipment has a better than 100BaseT Ethernet port?
Have you tried cat 3 or something awful like bell wire? It would be intresting to see how the cables resist interference from things like an electric motor, mains wiring or flourcesant lighting, and if shielding makes a difference.
Here's a test for you, I did a little testing, but I wasn't about to go into it scientifically. There is 30awg slim cables from Monoprice Cat6A... Was upgrading my router, switches to all 2.5GB appliances since I got a fiber connection and figured I would downsize the space the cables were taking from my patch panel to my switches with these 30awg, noticed after swapping my WAN and LAN speeds decreased. Was getting over 600mb transfer speeds from my server to a workstation via 2.5GB connection and when the 30awg was put in it dropped to 300/400 and wan speeds went from 1.3GB ish down to 900mb
In near perfect conditions most cable classes will go well above their specification, in not so perfect conditions is where you will see the difference dramatically! Get some RF and electrically noisy things near the cables and the results will be different.
As some people have also noted, a noise free environment in the home is awesome but in commercial premises, that doesn't happen. My eperience on one multi-floor site where we put in Cat5E (customer budgetry restraints) resulted in good performance at 1GBs before everyone moved in but problems when it was all working and everyone was there and working. Lights were on, coffee machines, water heaters, and all sorts of other electrical noise generated from normal use in the office environment were operating. The customer made a complaint, I investigated and found the problem was related to office activity. In an after-hours test, we showed that with a lack of activity, the speeds were fine. The more equipment that was turned on, the worse it got. Twelve months later he had the funds to put in (The then brand new) Cat6A. Where he got it from I don't know as it was as scarce as golden mouse poop at the time, but we put it in and the problems dissappeared. We used the old Cat5E as draw wires when we could and it made it quite easy to pull in the new cables.
I love this videos, because of your videos I ran cat 6a for future proofing in my house. I think it would be beneficial to indicat the AWG of the cable on the screen as well, becuase that's a huge factor when dealing with length. Maybe that's a AWG 23 or lower cat 5E that's why it's doing so well
Were they all UTP, or are they shielded? Cat6 has 5 types I know of for shielding (without going to the armoured type... most are expensive, and designed so they could be direct burial, too)
When I built my house in 2000, I installed Cat 5E for the phone lines and Cat 6 for data as that was about the best widely available at that time. Since my landline phones are long obsolete, I switched many of the Cat 5E lines over to data to get additional Ethernet ports. I was expecting to see some performance degradation, but basically the performance is indistinguishable. The longest run in my house is probably 80’ and many are 50’ or so. I also installed optical fiber in my house, but have yet to terminate it as I have not exceeded what my copper can do and likely won’t in my lifetime … but the fiber is there for someone in the future who may need it. 😀
When electromagnetic interference happens over those cables then cat5e performance begins to degrade while other cables wont. If no interference, I think the speed will be the same for all cables.
In 2000, this wasn't the case, but today Cat5e and Cat6 are so close in price, why do people even buy Cat5e? In 2000 you ran optical fiber with no plan to use it immediately? I'm not sure if that's brilliant or crazy! 😆
@ I only did it for two reasons: 1. I worked for the largest manufacturer of optical fiber, and 2. I got a really good deal on some leftover fiber from a local hotel project. I got 6 fiber cable for $1/foot. The contractor had something like 600’ left over and for $600 bucks it was a no-brainer.
cat 5 getting 10gbps as the only cable in a home environment is one thing now wire up a building w cat 5 where u have bundles of dozens of cat 5 cables jammed together in conduits next to power lines and see what u get over one of those cat 5 cables at 100,200,300 ft when all the other ones next to it r going full chat and the noise from the building’s power lines too.. quickly the official ratings start to make a lot of sense but ur right none of this matters in a minimal home (lab) context
(nice video to show the home users that don’t understand what the purpose is of cat 8 vs cat 5 that they’re not gonna get better performance out of more expensive cat 8 haha)
For home wiring I find the larger issue is the power consumption of the switches, and if you want to future proof the home, a lower (thicker) AWG for higher-power POE+(+). Even WIFI routers are hard-pressed to get anywhere near a gigabit (let alone more) when more than one or two devices are hanging off of it. At most I might run 10Gbe between my main server and workstation. It’s 1Gbe for everything else because 1Gbe switches burn less than 5W, almost nothing needs more than a gigabit anyway, and I have almost a dozen switches strewn around the house. I even use 100Mbit in one or two places that I can’t conveniently get cabled because that will run over 2-pair of telephone wire already in the wall and POE+ will still negotiate 15W over 2 pair.
For commercial installations, the question and ambiguity is around the 100m (330') formal limit of the Ethernet standard. All the cable manufacturer performance graphs stop at 100m. Do we need a margin and stay under 100m? Can the cable speed be sustained beyond the magic 100m? If a certified, quality cable still works at 110m, there is the margin! Test to 115m to separate quality from marginal or sub-standard. Note that there are latency issues in 115m. The actual success or failure depend in the internal workings of the end switches / devices. Can a CAT6A cable working at 1 or 2.5 Gbps have no trouble at 115m?
Really interesting, and you clearly have some decent cables there. But how confident are you that cables sold as, say, Cat 6 are actually made and tested to that standard? Years ago I remember reading a well-argued article that said many cables from well-known brands didn't meet their claimed specs. What's your view on that? (As an extreme example, I have an Amazon cable that was sold as Cat 6. Since it's literally as thin as a bootlace, I think that's unlikely.)
I had a rebuilt home wired with ethernet and 120VAC at approx the same time, different vendors and found that they were using each others routing and conduit (so long parallel routes). It two me 2-1/2 days of rework to fix it. So your mileage will vary depending on actual cable quality, routing, shielding and proper grounding of equipment. I also fixed the main internet CAT6A cable which was dropping frames because of poor grounding at the receiving end. It's not just the cable.
Now route the cables round a busy arc welding workshop, then hopefully you'd see a difference as the different levels of shielding would prove their worth. In a typical home environment it probably makes little difference.
wow, i guess we have to nitpick things at this point. the fraction of a second to hit 10gb, i guess i should rip out my entire house of 5e just to gain that back
What you "can" do in your house... may vary, due to EMI in the area. Be interested to see on even older cables (Cat3 and Cat5)... to show that everything else being equal... if you're not in a EMI cluttered area... can use the old cable. According to IEEE 802.3bz, Cat-5e is minimum for 2.5GBase-T (100m) Now... rerun the tests where the cables are beside a 18 GA power cord, while it's got a motor load (like a fan) and see how much EMI would cause issues.
I believe if you also run a power cable wrapped around or near your coils, you should see some difference as the CAT 8 should do better than the CAT 5 on interference.
I bought 2 cables CAT 5E, 100 feet long each one, for linking routers in MESH, instead using WiFi link mode. Price 8 USD thru Aliexpress 30 meters about 100 feet. For that network the internet provider speed is 300 Mbps, and the 4 routers MESH network is Xiaomi WIFI 7 BE5000
This is not unexpected for 30 meters. I would suggest the same tests at 60 meters over. Your test setup is fine and will respond ok as per my experience there is a lot of "marketing" pushing for more expensive cabling. Remeber, most CAT 6 are rated for 1Giga for 100 meters but CAT 5E is also rated for 1Giga for 100 meters. :) The real test is to bunch plenty of cables together transmitting together, and there would be a slight loss due to cross talk. The brand of the cable can make a difference too. Bad quality CAT5E will not give your multi giga speeds. Overall a great video!
Still on CAT5✌ both 2.5GB & 1GB nic on mobo but ISP is only 67mbps until the contract is up, with wifi version unknown really old on laptop I only get 5mbs wireless over network or 30mbs if I plug the ethernet cable in, I have seen 100mbs SSD to NVMe over network cabled file type dependant.
The main issue i've had with ethernet cables is that SO MANY are now CCA (copper coated aluminum) or even worse, CCS (copper coated steel) garbage. Both types are fragile as hell and have ridiculous internal resistance, to the point where a 5m cable couldn't even reliably do 1gbps and the connection kept dropping down to 100mbps
Was hovering over the downvote thinking this was going to be some BS "need to buy Cat 7 or 8!" but of course I was glad to see it ends up representing reality that Cat 5 that folks might already have is perfectly fine for home run lengths. Our large ISP's CTO runs cat 5 for his large home server 10gig environment because that is what he has in his walls. As for that 2ms ping, that is just issue with the measurement of that test, not something the cable is going to be affecting by 1ms. Ping isn't really going to change because the electrons aren't going further or slower over the cable, it will take the same amount of time.
I made a similar test with the same result. Cat 5 was was my big surprise. I could not believe so i tested several Cat5. the performance was about 15 % less in average. My assumption - the criteria for the categories are a scam to the buyer. I discovered the big difference lays not by categories but by the type of shielding. Obvious the shielding is a lesser or no criteria for the determination of the categories. I tested also cables running along ac power cables. Schielding and length influenced the result but not the categories so to speak. I felt betrayed by the missleading standards because the shielding does somehow not count within categories .
Thanks so much for doing this testing. I have some long runs in the house of cat 5e and I was worried what you were going to post! I've never had a problem as my uses arent particularly demanding but I really appreciate the data!
i did a 60 meter cable from my house i was only getting a 10mb connection on cat 6 and cat 7 had both cables tested and are ok. had to run a fibre cable instead and connect was 1000mb
I've tested Cat5e at 1,000ft (full box) and it still gets gigabit. Not rated for it. Won't always get it. But it can. I wouldn't be surprised if it'll do 10Gbps at 300ft.
Test them at the max rating to verify it. At 55m because at lower length it is understandable they will perform well. For Cat 7 and 8 no need but maybe just 5, 6, 6A will be very interesting!
The shielding means shielding from interference. Get each cable from 50 meters to 100 meters each and run it next to your electrical system, likenthe junction box. If you kept the dables on the table with out any interference, the measurement is not worth itnlike this. Please search the reason behind it al. Also, you keep saying 100 ft, but it 100 meters.... 300 ft for the spec.
One thing I've seen in documentation is running cables next to 120V and also adding PoE. You want 2" for shielded cables and 8" for unshielded from parallel 120V wires. Also you want to check running cables in a large bundle. Larger bundles need more shielding. These are all things I've read. In my case, cheap Chinese no-name brand connectors were the issue.
Cat5e cables are not the same compare early days. They are realy good shielded. You see the difference only with patchpanel between and cable length over 170m!!
Using an online speedtest server makes this testing pretty much useless. Best to simply plug these wires into a Fluke DSX 5000 and run cable performance tests. You will get pretty graphs that will tell you all you need to know. Cable performance can vary significantly from different vendors for same "rated" cable, Cat5e, Cat6, etc etc.
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Here I was thinking my homes cat5e cable network was outdated . Thanks bro
No problem
The shorter the cable the more chance it has of doing fine at 10gbit. Although i think this channels has some issues with the used 10gbit network cards, because the cat6a and above should be able to reach 100m in length and still get to 10gbit. Seen it working in datacenters so should work at home. So something has to be wrong with his tests.
Outdated? That's what big cable wants you to think.😅
Nah, you don't put it in on a new build, you do 6 for home and 6a in some special commercial sites. But if you have it, you keep it. No need to change anything.
Don't forget, cat5e officially not supporting 10gbps over 30m is in a commercial environment, where you have a huge bundle of cables right next to each other, and cross talk between cables is more of an issue. With a single cable that's not even close to any other cables, of course it's going to work just fine. Think an office environment where a whole floor's worth of cables comes into one central wiring room - the bundle can have hundreds of cables in it.
I’d point out as I was a data tech installed millions miles of cable, where most of your tests on Cat6 and above where pretty much standard, I venture to say where the 5e would show weakness is when bundled with other many other cables with traffic on them
the cross talk would severely reduce speed results as jitter and retransmits increase.
That’s why in real word installations as in a commercial buildings, offices, collages, schools,and especially Hospitals we ran CAT6,7 or 8A. Where you have hundreds of cables in trays racks and plenums.
In the average home CAT 5e would probably be ok, but, depending on connection quality, and the amount of RFI would make a difference, as in apartment with hundreds of devices nearby. You’d probably be surprised how much RF is flying around the average house. Think about it, every bluetooth, phone, laptop, wireless device, security, TV, routers.
I ran cable for more businesses than I can remember and never had a problem with Cat 5e, as long as the length was in spec and not run parallel to power cables.
The majority of the buildings I worked in were not big enough to be more than double the max recommended length of a Cat 5e run. So, I never actually needed to run anything else. Similarly, the cable bundles rarely exceeded a couple dozen, in spite of most places having multiple runs to each desk/cubicle for VoIP and data.
The fact is, the only time I even experienced crosstalk was on a literally severed (pots) analog phone line.
If I never had a problem in all of those businesses, your average home user never will.
@@zgames9400….unless they’re trying to achieve 10Gbps….
I hazard a guess that the vast majority of your installations were 1gbps?
Also, I get the feeling the cost of the cable is dwarfed by the labour cost, and so installing a higher spec cable gives a higher chance of success (ie the least chance of interference degrading the performance) and also future-proofing the infrastructure for the end user?
RFI/EM definetly going to degrade the signal .. more devices over a broader EM spectr degrade it exponetially ... its insane ppl dont know about EM/RFI and crosstalk .. separation and shielding is ur friend .. just measuring the cables with a simple oscilloscope and u get the picture .. its just insane how many times the solution is to just move one cable ...
So guys what's the right way to install S-FTP? Do we need to ground shield to get it work? Often interference in ground bus (especially if something powerful is grounded to make it worse than usual UTP.
@@nomars4827 well ground is ground, grounding won’t introduce noise, it will help reduce it. Only time grounding introduces noise is if you a ground loop where signal grounds are not end grounded, there for “ground loop”. Major issue in audio equipment.
Speed is all the same. You’re welcome!
cat5E is rated 1Gbe for 100m, it can push 10GbE for about 30m, the test is accurate. 2.5GbE over 100m for cat5e also.
Impressive for sure
I am using a Cat5 25m cable salvaged from a datacenter decommissioning to run 2.5Gb/s. It works great.
That cable is over 25 years old.
But I wouldn't trust it if it has to be use in the middle of a bundle of cable. I would have concerns about crosstalk.
In such case I would use at least Cat5e FTP or STP (ie shielded) cables.
I would use it as well as for short distance 10GbE (eg 30m) domestic applications. Our home are not datacenters.
@@landpet not really, unless impressive is within spec.
it is 10G "rated" for 55m. about 150 feet. technically it's the standard that is tweaked so it can work on cat5e+ on shorter spans. would be nice to see the same test for 50m cable runs. and chained patchcables (chain via a coupler).
but... it's The Copper Clad Aluminum 🙄
I've known this for many years. Well made Cat5e patch cables within a 100' and shorter are perfectly fine for server room connectivity up to 10GB. Plant infrastructure runs are a different story depending need for distance and grounding for outdoor installs etc. And frankly, any requirement to run 10GB or greater plant wide is an automatic fiber installation.
You should also have tested with iperf3, especially the UDP tests, to see if there's any difference in pakket drop rates
I’ll see if I can do that as well
@@landpetjust wanna say i love how you take constructive criticism and feedback . I remember seeing comments about a suggestion in changing the length of the cables to be longer.
in another video he shows that some speed are fake due to high packets drop
Also the unshielded cables if left coiled and used in testing will give more noise then shielded.
@@iSwaggs2000 homie has been shoving it back into people's faces to prove them wrong thats why. So many seem to not accept that 5E can pull these off
A fiber optic home network absolutely is affordable now. I have switched over to 10G fiber and got a switch for a $100, and used fiber NICs for $10. Long runs of fiber cable (50+ feet) were actually cheaper than ethernet when I did mine. The fiber cable is much nicer to run and much more slender. With the absurd power draw of 10G ethernet I don't know why anyone would choose that over fiber. Plus now I can easily upgrade to 40G or 100G when I want.
Remember to add the cost of the SPFs.
Yeah, but too much bending and the fiber is gone. This cable can (and will) work in that case, even if you cut half of the wires you can still make use of the cable. 😏
Maybe the results whould changed if the cables were put in a "electro-noisy" environment like a factory with machineries, electric motors, lights, etc.
Yet, it's a very interesting test for the average home user !
possibly
I was going to make exactly this comment. Shielding would likely be required to still achieve good 10Gbps performance in an installation with other data and power cables.
Even running close to electric wires might change the results
@@landpet It would be easy to run a few power cables beside your Ethernet cables and give it a try.
When ethernet was first demonstrated it was shown with the cable wrapped around a large motor and jet engine. No loss.
Good video. The CAT cable rating includes the 100 meter (328 foot) edge case specification in a computer room with hundreds to thousands of other network cables running in parallel, causing interference with each other. So what you are measuring is just what can a 100Ft single cable in a low noise environment between 2 computers achieve. So it was interesting to see in your low noise environment test lab with 100 ft of CAT 5E you were still able to achieve almost 10Gb (approximately 1 Gigabyte per second) speed. That was better than I would have expected.
You should set the coil on top of a plugged in turned on power strip with some power bricks plugged in to simulate some electrical noise.
My house is wired with CAT 6. Glad to see it can do 10GBs. Even so, I prefer Cat 8 for all of my patch cables. My current network is 2.5 GB, happy to see I can do 10GB with my existing cable.
As someone who installs internet, I would like to see a video on whether there is any noticeable difference between 500MB vs 5GB for home use. I don't know of any websites that can even provide a single user those kind of speeds. Maybe if you had a peer to peer with both having the same speeds. The only benefit to multi gig speeds is for the ISP to make more money. If anyone thinks there is a video game server that has the capacity to provide upload speeds at 5GB to a single user to download a game, they are nuts. Just because you can speed test 5GB, doesn't mean you can actually use it. If customers were actually using the gig speeds they were paying for, the ISP would be overwhelmed. They purposely oversell the capacity, knowing that no one is actually using anywhere near the speeds they are paying for.
We have been using existing cat5e for our 5gig service for the past couple of years with no issues.
While no one device is likely to use more than ~500Mbps in my experience, the benefit to multi-gig Internet comes when you have multiple devices and multiple users. If you're trying to grab a 100GB Xbox game while the kid is downloading a game to *their* console, and the wife is trying to stream an AppleTV+ show at 4K HDR with Atmos at ~45Mbps... you'll be happy to have 1Gbps service, and may even see value from more than that.
Another use case is cloud backup. There are cloud backup providers that can sustain multi-gigabit uploads, and it's perfectly possible for a modern computer with a 2.5Gbps Ethernet card to saturate its connection dumping the contents of an nVME SSD.
That assumes, of course, that you have a router that can push multi-gigabit speeds without slowdown, multi-gigabit switches that operate at wire speed, and wired connections to your devices. For most people, who only use WiFi with one router tucked in a closet (meaning WiFi 6 speeds at best), there's little point in going over 500Mbps.
A 4K stream is likely the most a single device will use at a house and that is usually 20-25MB (25 MB) for apple tv. That means that you could have four 4K streams going and you're still only using 100MB. You'd be lucky if a video game server was providing you a connection at even 50MB. A house full of people would have a hard time consuming even 200MB regardless of the quality of their router or whether they are using wifi or hardwire. Once you have about 500MB to your house, you would want to start paying attention to the latency numbers and whether you have symmetrical upload to get improvements in usability
We have the option for 1,2,5GB and I could not imagine a usage case of 5GB that isn’t blatant copyright violation or website/business usage. Even full 2GB would be pushing into those usage cases. 1GB is right there on the edge of not being enough. Steam, Google and Xbox can get pretty close to maxing out regularly. I have 24/7 file sharing server running from my house and I still find it hard to justify paying for more than 1GB, just because of my own storage bandwidth and limits of other users that are connecting. I get about 8-10TB of bandwidth usage a month.
Usually anything over 1 Gbps is connected to local storage that you need high speed access to. Video or large photo editing, database projects, etc. There are probably very few use cases in which someone would rely on an ISP to download or upload to a single server/service at greater than 1 Gbps. Those are probably branch offices of a business at that point. I could be wrong, but my family gets by just fine on less than 100 Mbps down. The painful part is the 5-30 Mbps upload for high resolution photos to backup services!
Wow. thank you for this! Conclusion : under 30 meters (100 ft) there's absolutely no point in buying the more expensive ethernet cables. Even Cat5e is very close to Cat6 performance, reaching almost 10 Gbps! And everything else above is not better. Incredible!
I've done Coaxial to F/UTP (used it for TV signaling) and the F/UTP gave crystal clear image, top quality and 0 interference. 👌🏻 Would recommend 100%
As someone who ran a lot of Cat 5e professionally, the only time you will see an advantage to newer categories of Ethernet cable is when you try to exceed the recommended specs for the cable.
The only way Cat 5e will not have identical results to the other cables in a speed test is if the cable is damaged or you otherwise failed to keep ideal/identical test conditions.
You should never experience even one lost packet over Ethernet on a LAN, unless you have done something you shouldn't.
In other words, as long as your cable is certified to be within spec, isn't damaged and doesn't have interference overwhelming the shielding, you can expect the cable to perform at 100% perfection until it rots.
Thanks for the insight!
Someone tried to exceed 100 m by too much and I saw the test results. What you fail on first is total resistance. They tried 150 m with half being a good quality cat 6 and the other half, elevator ribbon. One worked, the other one did not. Had to add a repeater in the middle. And that was at 100 Mbit.
When I built my house in 1993, I ran Cat3 to each room. Still using it with 0 errors at Gigabit speeds. I'm not recommending it for new installs, but for short runs, it does seem to work just fine. New runs are all Cat5
I'm running Cat 6e for several very important, vital, and utterly critical reasons:
* It was one of the cheapest cables in the hardware store.
* It came at the right length - the 5s were either 30cm or 30m; this was 2m.
* The cable was slightly narrower and less of a pain to work with.
* The boot on the plugs ensured that it will never, ever turn into one of those classic Cat 5 snap-off grappling hooks.
Speeds're fine.
I'm not a pro here, but the cat categories haven't have much to do with transfer speed, though bandwidth and sped rating is different, but with resistance against interference. I'm replaced old Cat5e with Cat7, which do have a good shielding and my problems with performance completely disappeared. I think I have too many cables under the table (2 workstations, laptop station, RPi home server,...) and there was an interference.
Just a quick question. Were the cables stretched out to the full 100 feet or were they left in a coil? Would love to see if there is a difference. Being in a coil can cause cross talk/interference.
Here in the Scottish highlands I have 14mbps D/L and 1.5 Mbps U/L.... should I just use a strand of bell wire?!?
lol
Funny thing, most places here in the USA switched to Cat 5/5e cable for POTS lines because it is cheaper than running multiple runs of the old phone cable.
Since you only need a single twisted pair to act as a line, a Cat 5/5e cable can carry 4 phone lines. This usually translates to either 4 RJ11 or 2 RJ12 cable outlets for actually connecting a phone.
The added benefit is that you can easily convert them to data cables, when you switch to VoIP, which is what most businesses did over a decade ago. Most individuals have switched to cell phones.
So, it's really getting rare to see anything older than Cat 5 in someone's walls.
My man, you cant be thanked enough for these tests. Thanks again.
Glad they were helpful!
Wow! I was about to spend a good penny on running cat 6 cables in my house. I had my house built in 2009 and it was wired with cat 5e. Time to rethink. Thanks for the test.
No problem! You can run tests on your own network as well, it should be fast
you should run a speed test. There may be a reason to upgrade if the cables are in a eclectically noisy area
Just a thought, t
If still coiled up the effect of external interference is minimized. Stretch it out run it near fluorescent lights, amplifiers, electric motors, throw in a thunderstorm…. Still interesting the wire type itself isn’t an issue.
I've uncoiled for other tests and it has made a difference in a case or two but these things can reach 10Gbps coiled so I just left them coiled. I haven't though about any interference
It should also be noted in order to get speeds of that nature you also need supporting routers, switches, and ethernet ports/cards to support the same speed as the cables.
Correct, I did mention I have the hardware to support it
It really doesn't need to be noted, as it's obvious.
Interesting, especially the cat5e result
Yeah, that one was the big shocker
Who’s your isp that you have 5gigs up/down?
What about fiber optic cable instead of copper? Are there affordable optical NIC's available?
Fiber optic is supposed to be better but I haven't tested that
I have switched over to 10G fiber and it absolutely is affordable. You can get a switch for a $100, and used fiber NICs for $10. Long runs of fiber cable (50+ feet) were actually cheaper than ethernet when I did mine. The cable is no much nicer to run and much more slender. With the absurd power draw of 10G ethernet I don't know why anyone would choose that over fiber.
Now test different brands of CAT5E. I roll my own, so I wonder if there’s also a difference in performance between the pin out on the cable and whether you’d see a difference between T568A and T568B.
An interesting test is to do this all again without the switch in the middle. Direct single cable between two 10gb machines running your tool or iprf udp and see the difference.
They will somehow slow down with nothing on the middle?
Dude, as it was mentioned before in previous videos, packet loss and connection stability is a major thing to test. Speed only by itself during a short test doesn't matter much.
Still kudos for the tests, nice that someone actually tested Ethernet speeds with different types of cables and at different lengths. 👍
I think they’re both important. I’ll be doing another video with the packet drop test as well.
@@landpet you are best, bro
or you just reaching to discredit 5e.
Yeah and at under 100', that's not a thing soooooo....
How can you test for anything if you first don't test the cable for max speed in the best conditions? ...It literally the foundation of all tests after that.
That’s pretty amazing. I was contemplating upgrading my older cables 5e, but not really sure I need to now. They are all under 30 meters easily. Thank you for this comparison
No problem!
The thing is that all those cables are just twisted copper wires to connect two equipment together the main thing is the wire gauge and whether it's shielded or not plus the isolation.
Hi - thanks for doing the work. Oddly, I just watched your video of testing with shorter cables and wrote a comment. This was a better test and more interesting to watch. Thank you.
Yup got a lot of comments about longer cables so I bought a bunch and tested
Just in time for my new NAS build, excellent video man!
Glad I could help!
Relax, unless you're investing $100K in your NAS you'll never hit any limits past 6a.
I usually make up my network cables using 568B standard.
I'd be interested to see if an incorrectly made up cable would affect the speed.
ie not swapping the blue and green pairs in the plugs.
This was an awesome video! Thank you. Could you do the full network cable length? 100m? Would love to see the results
I replied to your other comment but yeah tested up to 91m
@ i saw thank you for the awesome content
When I was remodeling my house, there was a deal on CAT6 from Monoprice that made it cheaper than 5e at the time, so I wired up my whole house. A couple years ago I upgraded from 2.5Gbps to 10Gbps and saw full speed on my transfers. That said, I haven't tested all 43 runs... The odds that none of them have a nail, acrew, or kink... not great. 😂
Looks like it dont matter. From what I understand the noise shielding, and casing for uv resistance, and burial is what's different between them. I could be mistaken.
The maximum from spec is 100m? Or less? I will have to make something like 80m long 200-300Mbit/s internet connection, outside and I looking for right cable/technology to do it. What's you recommend?
That is a breath of fresh air. Twenty years ago, during remodeling, I wired the house with CAT5e. The official spec is 100 Mbps. I recently found that Xfinity (Comcast) was charging me for a 1200 Mpbs service. I called and asked to instead cut the service to 200 Mbps on the theory that it is pointless to pay for a speed that the wiring can't support. I have noticed more buffering at the start of streaming but in use interruptions are rare. Most of the connected hardware is Gigabit rated. It is good to know that my installed wiring isn't completely obsolete. At some point I may upgrade to the next speed tier for the cable connection.
I was genuinely surprised the first time I saw the speeds, I didn't think cat5e can go that fast.
Use fiber installations inhouse, works till 1 TBit without problems. 🤦♂️🙄
Not use "theoretical problems", tested it self. 😮 My neighbor use length over 100 m for 1 GBit network shielded cat 7 cable since near 8 years - just one problem - the first switch goes to 120 meter mark - +40 meter more do not work. 😂 Okay, technically this are both difference houses - just a UTP-cable between arrived at box and switch - never a problem! [Theoretical maximum length 100 meter between 2 switches]
I did the same 20 years ago but can't get more than 100mbits on my cat 5e and I can't figure out why. Even for runs 30 feet. Wonder if it could be my endpoint in wall connectors?
@@jessejames586yes the terminations may be the issue. Fast Ethernet (100 Mbps) only uses four wires, while gigabit uses all eight. It's common for there to be some fault that allows linking up at lower speeds but prevents gig from working.
@@jessejames586 Possibly. I personally installed all the end point connections myself at the time of installation. The wire I am posting this comment on is about 100' from the 16-port switch. Also, are you sure all the connected equipment has a better than 100BaseT Ethernet port?
Have you tried cat 3 or something awful like bell wire?
It would be intresting to see how the cables resist interference from things like an electric motor, mains wiring or flourcesant lighting, and if shielding makes a difference.
So, if the length at home is no more than 15m, Cat6 will be more than enough. What swich will be budget friendly for 10 Gbps ?
Here's a test for you, I did a little testing, but I wasn't about to go into it scientifically. There is 30awg slim cables from Monoprice Cat6A... Was upgrading my router, switches to all 2.5GB appliances since I got a fiber connection and figured I would downsize the space the cables were taking from my patch panel to my switches with these 30awg, noticed after swapping my WAN and LAN speeds decreased. Was getting over 600mb transfer speeds from my server to a workstation via 2.5GB connection and when the 30awg was put in it dropped to 300/400 and wan speeds went from 1.3GB ish down to 900mb
I imagine the distance may make a difference as well but 30awg is pretty slim. These cables are thicker in the 20s that I tested with.
In near perfect conditions most cable classes will go well above their specification, in not so perfect conditions is where you will see the difference dramatically! Get some RF and electrically noisy things near the cables and the results will be different.
As some people have also noted, a noise free environment in the home is awesome but in commercial premises, that doesn't happen.
My eperience on one multi-floor site where we put in Cat5E (customer budgetry restraints) resulted in good performance at 1GBs before everyone moved in but problems when it was all working and everyone was there and working.
Lights were on, coffee machines, water heaters, and all sorts of other electrical noise generated from normal use in the office environment were operating.
The customer made a complaint, I investigated and found the problem was related to office activity.
In an after-hours test, we showed that with a lack of activity, the speeds were fine. The more equipment that was turned on, the worse it got.
Twelve months later he had the funds to put in (The then brand new) Cat6A. Where he got it from I don't know as it was as scarce as golden mouse poop at the time, but we put it in and the problems dissappeared. We used the old Cat5E as draw wires when we could and it made it quite easy to pull in the new cables.
Interesting
I love this videos, because of your videos I ran cat 6a for future proofing in my house. I think it would be beneficial to indicat the AWG of the cable on the screen as well, becuase that's a huge factor when dealing with length. Maybe that's a AWG 23 or lower cat 5E that's why it's doing so well
Thanks, that's not a bad idea for the AWG. My "solution" to that was that I listed all the cables I used so you could find out all the info about it.
I would be interested to see if any of the other cables can go higher than their rated speeds.
Were they all UTP, or are they shielded? Cat6 has 5 types I know of for shielding (without going to the armoured type... most are expensive, and designed so they could be direct burial, too)
I have links to all the cables if you want to check them out for all the specs
When I built my house in 2000, I installed Cat 5E for the phone lines and Cat 6 for data as that was about the best widely available at that time. Since my landline phones are long obsolete, I switched many of the Cat 5E lines over to data to get additional Ethernet ports. I was expecting to see some performance degradation, but basically the performance is indistinguishable. The longest run in my house is probably 80’ and many are 50’ or so. I also installed optical fiber in my house, but have yet to terminate it as I have not exceeded what my copper can do and likely won’t in my lifetime … but the fiber is there for someone in the future who may need it. 😀
When electromagnetic interference happens over those cables then cat5e performance begins to degrade while other cables wont. If no interference, I think the speed will be the same for all cables.
In 2000, this wasn't the case, but today Cat5e and Cat6 are so close in price, why do people even buy Cat5e? In 2000 you ran optical fiber with no plan to use it immediately? I'm not sure if that's brilliant or crazy! 😆
@ I only did it for two reasons: 1. I worked for the largest manufacturer of optical fiber, and 2. I got a really good deal on some leftover fiber from a local hotel project. I got 6 fiber cable for $1/foot. The contractor had something like 600’ left over and for $600 bucks it was a no-brainer.
cat 5 getting 10gbps as the only cable in a home environment is one thing
now wire up a building w cat 5 where u have bundles of dozens of cat 5 cables jammed together in conduits next to power lines
and see what u get over one of those cat 5 cables at 100,200,300 ft when all the other ones next to it r going full chat and the noise from the building’s power lines too..
quickly the official ratings start to make a lot of sense
but ur right none of this matters in a minimal home (lab) context
(nice video to show the home users that don’t understand what the purpose is of cat 8 vs cat 5 that they’re not gonna get better performance out of more expensive cat 8 haha)
For home wiring I find the larger issue is the power consumption of the switches, and if you want to future proof the home, a lower (thicker) AWG for higher-power POE+(+). Even WIFI routers are hard-pressed to get anywhere near a gigabit (let alone more) when more than one or two devices are hanging off of it. At most I might run 10Gbe between my main server and workstation. It’s 1Gbe for everything else because 1Gbe switches burn less than 5W, almost nothing needs more than a gigabit anyway, and I have almost a dozen switches strewn around the house. I even use 100Mbit in one or two places that I can’t conveniently get cabled because that will run over 2-pair of telephone wire already in the wall and POE+ will still negotiate 15W over 2 pair.
Thanks. This is a very helpful comparison.
Glad it helped!
Very interesting results. Subscribed.
Thanks for the sub!
For commercial installations, the question and ambiguity is around the 100m (330') formal limit of the Ethernet standard. All the cable manufacturer performance graphs stop at 100m. Do we need a margin and stay under 100m? Can the cable speed be sustained beyond the magic 100m? If a certified, quality cable still works at 110m, there is the margin! Test to 115m to separate quality from marginal or sub-standard. Note that there are latency issues in 115m. The actual success or failure depend in the internal workings of the end switches / devices. Can a CAT6A cable working at 1 or 2.5 Gbps have no trouble at 115m?
I bought my house 26 years ago and the first thing I did was run cat5e everywhere. It was expensive back then. It was worth it.
Def worth it
Really interesting, and you clearly have some decent cables there. But how confident are you that cables sold as, say, Cat 6 are actually made and tested to that standard? Years ago I remember reading a well-argued article that said many cables from well-known brands didn't meet their claimed specs. What's your view on that?
(As an extreme example, I have an Amazon cable that was sold as Cat 6. Since it's literally as thin as a bootlace, I think that's unlikely.)
I had a rebuilt home wired with ethernet and 120VAC at approx the same time, different vendors and found that they were using each others routing and conduit (so long parallel routes). It two me 2-1/2 days of rework to fix it. So your mileage will vary depending on actual cable quality, routing, shielding and proper grounding of equipment. I also fixed the main internet CAT6A cable which was dropping frames because of poor grounding at the receiving end. It's not just the cable.
Oh, that’s no fun. Yeah it’s not just the cables but it’s one aspect
I bought 50ft gearIT cat8 and cut the ends off. The inner wire are softer and thin like cat6 cables. Didn’t notice that?
I haven’t done that, interesting
I feel cheated.
Now route the cables round a busy arc welding workshop, then hopefully you'd see a difference as the different levels of shielding would prove their worth. In a typical home environment it probably makes little difference.
What about those thin net cat 6 cables? Thanks for doing this test!
I've tried the thin flat cat7 cable and those can reach up to 10Gbps up to 100ft. Haven't tried a cat6 like that though
Good luck on finding the 40gbs copper ethernet adapter for that cable.
Thory and reality are two different things
if you notice it took longer to get to the ten gig speed with the lower rating cables than with the higher rated cables.
I didn't notice that, I usually just look at the results and when it's had a few seconds to run the test.
wow, i guess we have to nitpick things at this point. the fraction of a second to hit 10gb, i guess i should rip out my entire house of 5e just to gain that back
Care to share the results for each cable?
What you "can" do in your house... may vary, due to EMI in the area. Be interested to see on even older cables (Cat3 and Cat5)... to show that everything else being equal... if you're not in a EMI cluttered area... can use the old cable.
According to IEEE 802.3bz, Cat-5e is minimum for 2.5GBase-T (100m)
Now... rerun the tests where the cables are beside a 18 GA power cord, while it's got a motor load (like a fan) and see how much EMI would cause issues.
CAT6 is quite obviously the best option based on price to performance.
Cat6 is a good choice
I believe if you also run a power cable wrapped around or near your coils, you should see some difference as the CAT 8 should do better than the CAT 5 on interference.
Possibly
I bought 2 cables CAT 5E, 100 feet long each one, for linking routers in MESH, instead using WiFi link mode.
Price 8 USD thru Aliexpress 30 meters about 100 feet.
For that network the internet provider speed is 300 Mbps, and the 4 routers MESH network is Xiaomi WIFI 7 BE5000
should be good for those speeds
What about 200 meters or 600 feet? Which cable can deliver 10 Gbps at that distance?
This is the longest I've tested: ua-cam.com/video/3CR0_zPWKpI/v-deo.html
next, compare power consumption of the twisted pair transceiver for different link speeds and cable lengths.
I feel the biggest issue a lot of people have is not purchasing quality cables from reputable suppliers.
This is not unexpected for 30 meters. I would suggest the same tests at 60 meters over.
Your test setup is fine and will respond ok as per my experience there is a lot of "marketing" pushing for more expensive cabling. Remeber, most CAT 6 are rated for 1Giga for 100 meters but CAT 5E is also rated for 1Giga for 100 meters. :)
The real test is to bunch plenty of cables together transmitting together, and there would be a slight loss due to cross talk.
The brand of the cable can make a difference too. Bad quality CAT5E will not give your multi giga speeds.
Overall a great video!
Here's the 91m test
ua-cam.com/video/3CR0_zPWKpI/v-deo.html
Still on CAT5✌ both 2.5GB & 1GB nic on mobo but ISP is only 67mbps until the contract is up, with wifi version unknown really old on laptop I only get 5mbs wireless over network or 30mbs if I plug the ethernet cable in, I have seen 100mbs SSD to NVMe over network cabled file type dependant.
Wow you real did it with the longer cables. Saw this after watching your previous video with the shorter cables
Yup, got enough requests that I bought the cables and did it.
The main issue i've had with ethernet cables is that SO MANY are now CCA (copper coated aluminum) or even worse, CCS (copper coated steel) garbage. Both types are fragile as hell and have ridiculous internal resistance, to the point where a 5m cable couldn't even reliably do 1gbps and the connection kept dropping down to 100mbps
it would have been interesting to see the results of using cat5 in the same test.
Agreed but couldn’t find cat5 cables
Was hovering over the downvote thinking this was going to be some BS "need to buy Cat 7 or 8!" but of course I was glad to see it ends up representing reality that Cat 5 that folks might already have is perfectly fine for home run lengths. Our large ISP's CTO runs cat 5 for his large home server 10gig environment because that is what he has in his walls.
As for that 2ms ping, that is just issue with the measurement of that test, not something the cable is going to be affecting by 1ms. Ping isn't really going to change because the electrons aren't going further or slower over the cable, it will take the same amount of time.
Lol, yeah I did a real test. I was honestly surprised cat5e can go as fast as it could when I first found out.
I made a similar test with the same result. Cat 5 was was my big surprise. I could not believe so i tested several Cat5. the performance was about 15 % less in average. My assumption - the criteria for the categories are a scam to the buyer. I discovered the big difference lays not by categories but by the type of shielding. Obvious the shielding is a lesser or no criteria for the determination of the categories. I tested also cables running along ac power cables. Schielding and length influenced the result but not the categories so to speak. I felt betrayed by the missleading standards because the shielding does somehow not count within categories .
Yay, you are testing full duplex now
yeah not a bad idea, since ethernet is full duplex
Thanks so much for doing this testing. I have some long runs in the house of cat 5e and I was worried what you were going to post! I've never had a problem as my uses arent particularly demanding but I really appreciate the data!
Glad I could help!
Cat6A is usually fine for any application, Cat5A might, sometimes be a bit problematic but for general / basic usage Cat5A is perfectly ok!
i did a 60 meter cable from my house i was only getting a 10mb connection on cat 6 and cat 7 had both cables tested and are ok. had to run a fibre cable instead and connect was 1000mb
Interesting, was it a quality cable?
Did you try 30m for Cat 5
not for Cat5, those cables are hard to find
Building a new house now. I am running CAT6, but at the same time, I will have fiber ran next to it, so when CAT6 is maxed out, I will have fiber. 🙂
Nice
I've tested Cat5e at 1,000ft (full box) and it still gets gigabit. Not rated for it. Won't always get it. But it can. I wouldn't be surprised if it'll do 10Gbps at 300ft.
I tested at 300ft, it was around 4Gbps or so. I did a video on it, one of my recent ones. But that's pretty cool you got gigabit on 1000ft.
I’m pretty sure most homes would have cable runs
I would think it should be in most cases
Test them at the max rating to verify it. At 55m because at lower length it is understandable they will perform well. For Cat 7 and 8 no need but maybe just 5, 6, 6A will be very interesting!
This video is pretty close to your request: ua-cam.com/video/3CR0_zPWKpI/v-deo.html
All depends on the quality of the cable, looks like you got some good ones!
These had good ratings
Surprisingly, this video did NOT change how I buy ethernet cables... TLDW: they're all the same 5:55
I want a Cat 5 and Cat 3 test, maybe even POTS if possible.
Didn't come across the older cables for these distances
The shielding means shielding from interference. Get each cable from 50 meters to 100 meters each and run it next to your electrical system, likenthe junction box. If you kept the dables on the table with out any interference, the measurement is not worth itnlike this. Please search the reason behind it al. Also, you keep saying 100 ft, but it 100 meters.... 300 ft for the spec.
That may make a difference but harder to test that. When I wired my place, I was also trying to avoid any junction boxes.
What service is giving you 5gb internet speeds?
Frontier Fiber
One thing I've seen in documentation is running cables next to 120V and also adding PoE.
You want 2" for shielded cables and 8" for unshielded from parallel 120V wires.
Also you want to check running cables in a large bundle. Larger bundles need more shielding.
These are all things I've read. In my case, cheap Chinese no-name brand connectors were the issue.
I see
Do u mind to try Cat5 ? Thanks a lot
I didn’t find a cat5 cable
I would like to see each cable test at 300ft.
Already done the video, you can find it in my recent videos
Yep wired my house with c5e years ago knowing it would be perfectly fine for home use.
Yup cat5e is still great, I honestly didn't think it could go as fast as it did
Cat5e cables are not the same compare early days. They are realy good shielded. You see the difference only with patchpanel between and cable length over 170m!!
I'm almost certain you should not run cat 7 longer than 15 meters to get the rated specs
The Cat 5E speeds were a surprise.
Yup
you had to use the cli version of Speedtest okla to get all the speed
Can you test 300 Ohm twinax? LOL - Kidding. Great vid thanks.
No problem!
Using an online speedtest server makes this testing pretty much useless. Best to simply plug these wires into a Fluke DSX 5000 and run cable performance tests. You will get pretty graphs that will tell you all you need to know. Cable performance can vary significantly from different vendors for same "rated" cable, Cat5e, Cat6, etc etc.
I did a local speed test and online speed test to show how fast they can go
What about 300ft?
ua-cam.com/video/3CR0_zPWKpI/v-deo.html
@@landpet thanks!
very impressive , i got a 500mgb fiber and my ethernet cable is cat6 its great .
Yeah it could do that pretty easily