[SGVLUG] Buying a spool of ethernet wire - cat5e or cat6? Copper or aluminum? Where? How much?

[matti]

Hi,

Stan has some great advice.

Cat6 or Cat5e?

I would put Cat6 in, granted it is thicker and not as flexible,
but this is your house, and I take it you plan to keep it for awhile,
so you may as well as spend a little extra for better wiring.
( most of the cost will be your time to install )

DO NOT purchase any networking items for Home Depot.. you
will get ripped off in $. I think last time I used monoprice for the
jacks and wall plates. The company i purchased the cat6 wire
is no longer around. Get solid copper.


Also, you may actually want to run Coax from the Disk/Antennae down
to your wiring closet... and then branch out to your TVs..
so you may want to run coax on some of the runs.


Got plastic electrical boxes which I cut the backside out so
I could easily mount the faceplates. ( some friends just get a
metal frame for that. )

The thing you want to spend time on is determining the 

terminating "closet". Some people I know wanted to change it
after installing the wiring.. that does not work very well.
Pick the location and stick with it.


I like to drop 3 lines per location.. 1 for possible POE VOIP phone
thus that means 3 boxes for easier pulls.
( hint different color cables make it easy to ID the lines )


You probably want to drop an electrical line and network drops in
an area where you want to put another WiFi access point.. this will
depend on the size and construction of your home. Some homes
are small enough so that you only need one WiFi point.

Oh, and to minimize breaking drywalls get the long flexible drill
bits the electricians use. Very useful.

Let us know how it goes, or if you need help ..
matti



________________________________
 From: Stan Slonkosky <stan.ke6zc at gmail.com>
To: SGVLUG Discussion List. <sgvlug at sgvlug.net> 
Sent: Tuesday, July 31, 2012 4:48 AM
Subject: Re: [SGVLUG] Buying a spool of ethernet wire - cat5e or cat6? Copper or aluminum? Where? How much?
 




On Mon, Jul 30, 2012 at 2:14 PM, Dan Kegel <dank at kegel.com> wrote:

I finally used up my old spool of cat5 (loaning it to
>friends, wiring up my garage, etc.), and
>I need to wire up some network outlets in my new house
>(powerline networking #fail).  So time to buy a new
>spool.
>
>That brings up a few questions:
>
>1) cat5e, or cat6?  cat5e should be sufficient for gigabit.
>

If you use Cat5e connectors on Cat6 cable it will perform like Cat5e.  

There was an interesting interview with Stephen H. Lampen, MultiMedia Technology Manager at Belden on the now discontinued "This Week in Radio Tech" podcast on Leo Laporte's TWiT network. He says they sell the jacks, but not the plugs. While you can attach a Cat5e connector easily enough. Attaching Cat6 plugs in the field is difficult. Attaching Cat6a plugs is the most difficult thing they do at the Belden factory, so you can forgot about doing that in the field. This discussion starts about 38 minutes in:

http://twit.tv/show/this-week-in-radio-tech/111-0

Somewhere in the podcast he mentions that solid wire will always perform better than stranded though the stranded will probably cost twice as much. The only reason to use stranded is because you need flexibility.
 
2) Copper, or copper-clad-aluminum?  Aluminum would probably be
>annoyingly stiff.
>
>
In a screencast done in May, Mike Pennacchi discusses a problem that they had setting up for Interop New York a few years ago. They had purchased a couple of pallet loads of no-name cable and discovered that network signals made it through but POE did not. They tested arun of cable on which ethernet worked but the POE did not. They tested a 200' section of it with a Fluke Networks cable analyzer and found that it had a negative insertion loss and a negative return loss (e.g., fail). Also each wire had a resistance between 50 and 55 Ohms. They tested a known good cable of the same length and found it had both a positive insertion loss and a positive return loss and the resistance of each wire was about 11.5 Ohms. It turns out that the cable that they had problems with was copper-clad aluminum. Mike also mentioned that the bad cable didn't perform as well at lower frequencies. This would be consistent with the skin effect in which higher frequency currents
 mostly flow on the surface of conductors.

This is discussed about 20 minutes into the screencast:

http://www.screencast.com/t/dpqDKx0keB
-- 
Stan Slonkosky
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