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

[Matthew Campbell]

There are a couple of corrections to Stan's notes.

If you use Cat5e connectors with Cat6 cables you will have one of two
things happen:

Cat 6 is higher gauge wire than Cat5e and your connectors just won't work
with Cat6 cable.  I have run across this several times and in my experience
you get no worky.

If you do manage to squeeze a cat6 cable into a cat5e connector it works
fine just like a cat6 connector.

Dan, I have about 4000' of Cat6 left over from my house so you're using
Cat6.  ;)

Matt

---------
*Matthew Campbell*
Storage Solution Consultant
Storage Design and Engineering

*Kaiser Permanente*
IMG-Systems Integration
99 S. Oakland
Pasadena, CA 91101

626-564-7228 (office)
8-338-7228 (tie-line)
818-314-9897 (mobile phone)
Green Center 3-North, 031W29
---------
*kp.org/thrive*



On Mon, Jul 30, 2012 at 9:48 PM, Stan Slonkosky <stan.ke6zc at gmail.com>wrote:

>
>
> 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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