PhoenixFactor's profile

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Tuesday, October 8th, 2013 1:23 AM

Cat6

Hi. I'm about to wire my new house for tv. From talking to sales I now understand that I can use coaxial cable or ethernet cable to connect the wall to my cable boxes. My contractor wants to wire the house with CAT 6 cable to the outlets. Is this compatible with the UVerse system?

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9.4K Messages

10 years ago


@my thoughts wrote:
Yes will be compatible, cat 5 uses only two (green, orange) pairs of the four pairs available, cat 6 connections uses all 4 pairs.
Currently on a cat5 install the four pair could support two Ethernet connection off one cable run, ex. Set top box and game system.
If future go to cat6 configuration that one cable run will support only one device thus recommending to run two cables to each location.

 

Cable "category" is a specification for the cable and it's electrical communication specifications, not a notation of line protocol.  It is thus incorrect to say that "cat 5 uses 2 pairs and cat 6 uses 4 pairs".  The number of pairs used is determined by the line protocol, not the cable spec.

 

Category 5 cable (and when people say category 5 these days, they actually mean category 5e), can carry 100 MHz signals up to 300 feet with a specified minimum of cross-talk.  This specification is good enough to run a line protocol of either 100Base-TX (Fast Ethernet) or 1000Base-T (Gigabit Ethernet).

 

Category 6 cable can carry 250 MHz signals up to 300 feet with a specified minimum of cross-talk.  This specification can run 100Base-TX or 1000-Base-T at 300 feet, or 10GBase-T (10 Gbps Ethernet) up to 180 feet.

 

The penalty you pay for using Category 6 cable is the thicker cable with a higher bend radius, the requirement to use Category 6 8P8C connectors, patch panels, and wall plates, all of which are more expensive and more difficult to terminate.

 

Since 1000Base-T (Gigabit Ethernet) runs properly over Category 5e cable, the only reason to use Category 6 would be to run 10GBase-T Ethernet, and even then it can only run it at a reduced length of 180 feet.  If you want to run 10GBase-T Ethernet at the full 300 feet, then category 6a cable is required.

 

100Base-TX (Fast Ethernet) uses 2 of the 4 pairs on any cable (4 of the 8 wires), whereas 1000Base-T and 10GBase-T use all 4 pairs (all 8 wires).  In any case, it is always out of spec to repurpose any unused pairs in an Ethernet cable.  Even with Fast Ethernet where only 4 wires are used for data, in many cases the other 4 wires need to be connected, such as to support some modes of Power Over Ethernet (POE).

 

Contributor

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2 Messages

10 years ago

But the wire will be compatible with the boxes?

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