Ethernet Cables

[rogerdee123]

I just read an article on the web regarding how old (or old stock) ethernet cables can slow down your ethernet connections. The article recommended "Cat6" cables for modern T-1000 capacity ethernet.

So I have started checking my cables and discovered that indeed most of my Ethernet cables in use are T-10 (Cat 3?) or T-100 (Cat 4?) rated.

This article claimed an almost 50% improvement in data transfer when the writer installed Cat6 cables.

I bought some new Ethernet cables at Panthip about a month ago and just checked them and guess what ... T-10 rated.

Does anyone have any thoughts/ideas on this? Will changing the cables bring that much improvement? If so, I may have to rewire my office!

[RKASA]

Are your cables slowing you below the speed of your modem?  Most like not, but cable is cheap if you don't have to put in mass amount it does not hurt to have good cable.  If your talking about data over local network where you see real high speeds use the best you can afford.

[Veazer]

I just read an article on the web regarding how old (or old stock) ethernet cables can slow down your ethernet connections. The article recommended "Cat6" cables for modern T-1000 capacity ethernet.

So I have started checking my cables and discovered that indeed most of my Ethernet cables in use are T-10 (Cat 3?) or T-100 (Cat 4?) rated.

This article claimed an almost 50% improvement in data transfer when the writer installed Cat6 cables.

I bought some new Ethernet cables at Panthip about a month ago and just checked them and guess what ... T-10 rated.

Does anyone have any thoughts/ideas on this? Will changing the cables bring that much improvement? If so, I may have to rewire my office!

To quickly sum things up, Cat 3 is intended for reliable 10BASE-T connections (10 Mbit/s), Cat 5 is for 100BASE-T, and Cat6 is for 1000BASE-T. There's also some intermediate cable standards like cat4 and cat5e that are inbetween the 3/5/6 standards in terms of quality.

By far the most popular standard for 100Mbits/s connection is 100BASE-TX which uses 2 of the 4 wire pairs. There is another flavor called 100BASE-T4 that uses all 4 pairs and this supposedly can reliably use Cat3 but few people actually use these cards, it's pretty much 'dead' standard. I've got drawers full of them if you want any for free (hint: you don't).

Are you using gigabit ethernet or 100BASE-T? Your T-100 is the same as cat5, so that is sufficient if you're using 100BASE-T. You should be able to transfer at 5-6 MB/s (locally!). I would guess that a short run of cat3 would be ok, but it would be best to use cat5. Whether or not you'll see a change in performance changing likely depends on how long your cable runs are, but again this is just a guess.

Like RKASA said, it's unlikely that it could ever drop your speed below that of a Thai internet connection.

[Cuban]

>This article claimed an almost 50% improvement in data transfer when the writer installed Cat6 cables.

Bet they were selling CAT 6 Cables.

> Does anyone have any thoughts/ideas on this?

> Will changing the cables bring that much improvement?

Depends what you are doing currently with what equipment and what you expect.

The speed of any system is govened by the slowest element. If you are looking for a speed improvement when downloading a movie from the internet your govening factors are the uplink speed of the host computer, the time division bandwidth that you get from your ISP to your xDSL router and only then will the speed that your LAN is running at matter.

If you are moving medium to large files around the office across the LAN then it would be wise to ensure the hub or switch that you are using is at least a 100meg one. (I will assume your PCs have at least 10/100 LAN cards fitted.) This makes software patching and backup/restores reasonable and controllable centrally.

If you are seeing delays and slow response across a 100 meg office LAN the first port of call is looking at disk I/O on your servers and PCs. Improving these simple things gives much better return than spend on hardware upgrades to the infrastucture.

Of course to get the benifit you would need to upgrade your NICs to 1,000 meg as well.

> If so, I may have to rewire my office!

I'm sure someone would be pleased to do this for you.

I'm sure they might even consider installing CAT 6 to the correct standards, with respect to minimum diameter radius curves and 90 degrees crossing of electrical supply wiring using bridges and non-deforming cable management systems (not ty-wraps).

I'm sure you would not notice a differance.

((Regular defrags and removal of junk from computers offers a better improvement.))

[Obiwan]

I guess the distance you want to go with these cables is very important , if you have only a couple of meters then the lower grade cable would be fine, but 40 or 100 meter needs a good quality cable.

[dave_boo]

I agree, we need a current speed test done on your setup; along with more information. An important thing to consider is that an Ethernet network is lucky to run at 100 MBytes/sec. Sorry, but those are the facts. 1 000 Mbit/s (1 Gbit) is all of 128 MBytes/sec. Add in all the overhead, and you'll quickly see that a ~80% efficiency is pretty good. And unless you have an array that can feed another machine information that fast, and the other machine has an array that can write that fast....don't worry about it too much.

[autonomous_unit]

It doesn't take much of a file serving environment to saturate 100BaseT... that's only about 12 MB/s when you really get going on a full-duplex link, and even my laptop hard drive can sustain 20-30 MB/s for long transfers. It's hard for me to remember how many years ago it was that I experienced Linux and Solaris machines which weren't fast enough to do 12 MB/s with NFS.

So, I agree most PCs won't saturate a 1000BaseT link, but they certainly can benefit from being faster than 100BaseT...

On the other hand, if your storage server is a cheap SOHO "nas" box, most of those have such weak CPUs that they struggle to even saturate 100BaseT for NFS or CIFS traffic. Faster links won't help them.

[dave_boo]

Yes, there's a great improvement going to 1 Gb/s network over the old 100 Mb/s ones. IIRC, there's faster signaling, thus fewer collisions. And although it's not as true anymore, before the 1 Gb/s switches were usually of a higher quality.

And don't get me started on home NAS boxes. Absolute rubbish. Now a home server on the other hand......everyone who's someone should have one.

[endure]

Yes, there's a great improvement going to 1 Gb/s network over the old 100 Mb/s ones. IIRC, there's faster signaling, thus fewer collisions. And although it's not as true anymore, before the 1 Gb/s switches were usually of a higher quality.

Do you get collisions on a network that's using switches?

[dave_boo]

Yes, there's a great improvement going to 1 Gb/s network over the old 100 Mb/s ones. IIRC, there's faster signaling, thus fewer collisions. And although it's not as true anymore, before the 1 Gb/s switches were usually of a higher quality.

Do you get collisions on a network that's using switches?

I don't, but I also don't use a 200 Baht switch. Technically, you shouldn't get ANY collisions on a switched network, but I've seen some extremely shoddy networks using 'switches' that had horrendous performance which I always attributed to collisions.

For a high performing network, you need to make sure everything is set up right. And by high performing, I mean one that's not limited to simply connecting all the computers to the internet. I'm talking about daily backups, distributed computing, etc. Making sure that all cards are running on the same duplex mode (which shouldn't be a problem but sometimes the OS misconfigures the LAN), not overtaxing the switch, and checking that your modem isn't cause cruft in the system.

[cobra]

I guess the distance you want to go with these cables is very important , if you have only a couple of meters then the lower grade cable would be fine, but 40 or 100 meter needs a good quality cable.

That's my understanding also, length of cable runs, etc.

[rogerdee123]

Thanks for all the input. I've learned a lot. Mostly I've learned there's a lot I don't know! Particularly about the variables.

I'm going to have a pro (also a friend) come over and take a look at my set-up and give me some advice.