3 ms·

My experience is that your probably safe at 50ft and below. Which is actually the max cable lengths tested in this article. For single switch->switch runs in a

My experience is that your probably safe at 50ft and below. Which is actually the max cable lengths tested in this article. For single switch->switch runs in a non critical environment (say my house) I would personally push it as far as I could get away with rather than replacing a cable simply because it doesn't happen to be officially sanctioned. What might have been more interesting is if they plugged those failing cables into a few switches to see if they actually were having problems anywhere. I'm betting they were probably mostly working fine. Although I have to wonder how many people are buying cat 6/6A for "future proofing" rather than actually running 10G on it.

secabeen 8y ago
I posted this below, but I think it's also good here, because it's a fun anecdote. I have a 10Gig run on 200+' of Cat5E in production that works well with only a few hundred errors a year. Running fiber or Cat6A into that room would costs thousands. This is mostly a credit to the interface designers, who let us get away with stuff that we totally shouldn't. The Cat5E run is nearly perfect, entirely away from power lines, and clean direct from one room to another.
- StillBored 8y ago
  If your running direct port->port you get a lot of additional margin because the plug->jack is where a lot of the loss comes from and the assumption in the spec is that a run looks like "port jack->patch cable->panel jack->solid fixed run->jack->patch cable->end port". So if your cable run is "port->long solid conductor cable->port" its going to give you some extra feet.
tinus_hn 8y ago
Solving the random issues that result from going beyond the specs of the cabling is the worst. It works for months and then suddenly fails for no reason.
- StillBored 8y ago
  This hasn't been my experience with copper. It tends to work until someone breaks it. Optical SFP's OTOH, were my bane for many years as they do frequently degrade leaving a once perfectly functional link dropping some huge number of packets before anyone notices that the link has degraded to some 1980's level of speed. Port monitoring when your not a network provider, or big data center seems to be a "hard" problem.

secabeen 8y ago

I posted this below, but I think it's also good here, because it's a fun anecdote. I have a 10Gig run on 200+' of Cat5E in production that works well with only a few hundred errors a year. Running fiber or Cat6A into that room would costs thousands. This is mostly a credit to the interface designers, who let us get away with stuff that we totally shouldn't. The Cat5E run is nearly perfect, entirely away from power lines, and clean direct from one room to another.

StillBored 8y ago
If your running direct port->port you get a lot of additional margin because the plug->jack is where a lot of the loss comes from and the assumption in the spec is that a run looks like "port jack->patch cable->panel jack->solid fixed run->jack->patch cable->end port". So if your cable run is "port->long solid conductor cable->port" its going to give you some extra feet.

tinus_hn 8y ago

Solving the random issues that result from going beyond the specs of the cabling is the worst. It works for months and then suddenly fails for no reason.

StillBored 8y ago
This hasn't been my experience with copper. It tends to work until someone breaks it. Optical SFP's OTOH, were my bane for many years as they do frequently degrade leaving a once perfectly functional link dropping some huge number of packets before anyone notices that the link has degraded to some 1980's level of speed. Port monitoring when your not a network provider, or big data center seems to be a "hard" problem.