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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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SomeJoe7777
Expert
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9.4K Messages
10 years ago
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).
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PhoenixFactor
Contributor
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2 Messages
10 years ago
But the wire will be compatible with the boxes?
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