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All About Cats, and What Ethernet Classifications Mean
- chaps 3y agoAw, I thought this was related to, "A cat explains DNS". https://youtu.be/4ZtFk2dtqv0 https://youtu.be/4ZtFk2dtqv0
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- sandworm101 3y agoDont try to future proof you house with ethernet, fiber or any other cable. Install pull tubes, plastic pipes and passthroughs for pulling whatever cable is the new standard of the time. A house with a crawlspace and some riser tubes to upstairs rooms, or one big tube to an attic space, is far easier to upgrade than one with cat-9 outlets permanently baked into the walls.
- sarchertech 3y agoOur municipal ISP installed 20 cat6 drops for free when we built our house 2 years ago. I couldn’t find anyone local who would install any kind of cable tubing after spending a fair amount of time searching.
- bombcar 3y agoCable tubing is a meme. Nobody does it except possibly between floors, as fish tape and other things aren’t terribly complicated, and the cost is way higher than naked runs.
- genter 3y agoIf the framing is complicated, or it's an old building, it can be very difficult or impossible to fish it (And I consider myself to be extremely good with glow rods). Much better to install smurf before the drywall goes up.
- sarchertech 3y agoI’m sure that it’s easier, but I think you’re pretty much stuck doing it DIY. Commercial installers wouldn’t give me the time of day, and anyone who did residential work just looked at me like I was insane when I asked about smurf tube.
- pram 3y agoYeah I've been reading these 'conduit in walls' posts for two decades+ now. My cables go through the attic and drop straight down. I could literally grab most of them with my hands through the holes. It seems like theres very little to gain. Only place I'd see it as necessary are exterior walls that are full of insulation. Or if I was building a custom house or something.
- madengr 3y ago[dead]
- sandworm101 3y agoYou dont even need real tubes, just some holes between floors and pull ropes installed behind the drywall. In commercial construction there is a whole industry of wall/door passthroughs. Go backstage at any concert hall or sport arena and you will see 8"-wide pipe ends near the floor for running cables between rooms. Stuff like this: https://usabesco.com/devices/pass-through-devices-cable-firestop https://usabesco.com/devices/pass-through-devices-cable-fire...
- sarchertech 3y agoFrom my experience no commercial installer wanted to touch a residential install with a ten foot pole. My general contractor had no idea what I was even talking about, and all of the installers who did residential work thought I was crazy. I’m sure if I was willing to do it pay someone stupid amounts of money I could have done something. Or if I’d been willing to hold up construction and do it myself, but then I’d probably have been out even more money because at the time mortgage rates were skyrocketing.
- TeMPOraL 3y agoI keep saying that, come next general renovation, I want the flat to be cabled like ships in Star Trek are - with cable routes being walled only in half, like C instead of an O, with the open side masked by panels that can be removed to access the wiring, whether to inspect, repair or replace. After all, isn't it ridiculous that to do anything with cables, one has to pretty much demolish the whole flat first? Everyone rolls their eyes at me when I say this, and for some reason no one has seen such installations, nor heard of anyone doing them. Am I crazy or what? (And yes, if I ever build a house, I'll make sure to add Jefferies tubes!)
- arcanemachiner 3y agoI have always though the same thing. Adding new cables should be doable by pulling off a panel attached to the wall or ceiling.
- sandworm101 3y agoThis is already a thing. This is why offices have false aka "drop" ceilings. It creates a void space for cable runs and air handling.
- TeMPOraL 3y agoFunny thing - during last renovation, I agreed to a drop ceiling. I didn't realize until it was too late that they'll just hang drywall-ish thing from the frame and paint it over, so while technically cables run most of their length overhead, I'd still need to effectively destroy the ceiling to get at them. Plus, this does not solve the problem of the starting and ending segments of cables, that just go vertically through tight holes bored in the wall.
- hypercube33 3y agoI mean If you have drywall it's trivial to pull a cable down and throw in a lv bracket and wallplate
- idiotsecant 3y ago
- gizmo686 3y agoPractically speaking, the bigger issue is going to be that you don't have wires going to where you want them. Cat 5e supports gigabit speed and was became the standard in 2001. Practically speaking, many cat5 cables from before than happen to work well enough to be used as if they were cat5e (particularly if you don't push the distance), which pushes the date back to 1995. A lot of equipment you can buy today still only goes up to 100Mb/s, and a lot of houses still don't get even that from their ISPs. Even if you have a gigabit connection, most of the time the computer at the other end isn't going to be sending you data at gigabit speed. You might want gigabit speed to support multiple devices. But most houses don't have that many devices consuming high bandwidth at once, and when they do, you can feed them with multiple wires and/or access points. All of this is to say, for almost every house, the standard cable from 1995 is still perfectly adequate. Cat5e will probably still be fine, by the time you sell your house.
- hx8 3y agoWe must use our home networks very differently. If all you want is 100MB/s then you can get it with Wifi and why are we even talking about wires.
- tedunangst 3y agoBecause I actually get 100MB/s from wires.
- eru 3y agoLatency would be a good reason, wouldn't it?
- wongarsu 3y agoWifi tends to have issues with packet drop. Not an issue for YouTube, but in online gaming this matters. Another issue is in high density situations, like in apartment buildings where everyone has their own wifi, or typical flats or condos in European cities. There just aren't that many wifi channels, and if you have multiple people on the same channel say goodbye to your speed
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- Clamchop 3y agoMy impression is that a fiber installation will have legs and take you a few decades. Of course, we've been wrong many times before. But in any case, fiber remains impractical, expensive, and power-hungry.
- kalleboo 3y ago> fiber remains impractical, expensive, and power-hungry Depends on what you're comparing it to - if you're looking for 10 Gbit, then copper is probably going to be worse, at least on power
- amluto 3y agoI think a bunch of this is off. Single mode fiber is cheap, it’s been around for a long time, and as far as I know, even old single mode fiber supports modern standards just fine. (There have been improvements in tolerance to bending and in performance at extreme bandwidths far, far in excess of anything in your house.) Single mode fiber transceivers are now cheap and use less power than 10GigE copper, but until recently they were expensive. Multimode fiber comes in OM1, OM2, OM3, OM4, and OM5, and the older variants don’t get amazing speeds by modern standards. Copper takes quite a bit of power at faster speeds.
- nunez 3y agoI wanted to do a fiber run from my office (where my home automation Pi and office computers are) to our living room (where the fiber gateway is), but the cable breaks incredibly easily, dealing with SFP modules is a pain, and if cats discover it, it's game over. Surprisingly cheaper than CAT7 copper
- kalleboo 3y ago> but the cable breaks incredibly easily Interesting. I was helping a friend wire his small business with 10 Gbit fiber, and the fiber patch cables from 10gtek ("the cheapest thing on amazon") were surprisingly resilient - we were yanking them through the false ceiling, getting caught on things, etc, no worries at all. The fiber coming in from the ISP, OTOH, felt like the most delicate thing on the planet.
- sourcegrift 3y agoI've never heard of instant pull tubes, do you have a link that I can use to know more?
- mrweasel 3y agoPeople do stupid stuff with wiring all the time. Here it's not uncommon to have electrical wires cemented directly into the walls or strung in the space between the outer and inner walls. There's no replacing those without destroying the wall, it's idiotic. Older houses have plastic or metal pipes for running cables, ensuring that you can repair or upgrade the wiring. New house nope, forget it, costs to much.
- fleventynine 3y agoI don't think permanently wiring high-speed twisted-pair makes much economic sense: CAT8: $0.55 / foot Max speed; 40 Gbit Max length: 30m (https://www.monoprice.com/product?p_id=42957 https://www.monoprice.com/product?p_id=42957): --- 2 strand OS2 single-mode fiber: $0.09 / foot Max speed: 800 Gbit (today; theoretical max speed is much higher) Max length: >10km (https://www.cablewholesale.com/products/bulk-cable/fiber-optic-9-125/product-10f2-002nh.php https://www.cablewholesale.com/products/bulk-cable/fiber-opt...): OS2 has been around for decades, and will be more than good enough for the next several decades.
- 542458 3y agoWhile that’s an interesting idea, is there really any point in using anything beyond Cat 6 given the connectivity found on most devices today and for the foreseeable future? Terabit-supporting fiber is cool, but ultimately not that useful when all my devices only have gigabit Ethernet, or 10gig Ethernet at best. I can’t see SFPs showing up on mainstream consumer devices anytime soon, which renders the fiber dream impractical for a home environment.
- rconti 3y agoSeems fine? Our house has Cat5e going back to ~2008 (before we owned the house). It supports my 2.5Gbps PoE AP uplinks. We're about to remodel and this has me thinking I should go to Cat8.2. Maybe a thousand bucks in cable? If that? I'll also add fiber for the furthest reach of the house for "future-proofing" but fiber is the tech that keeps being promised Real Soon Like Now but nobody's using it for their devices.
- toast0 3y agoIf you have drops where you want them, test what you've got installed. Cabling that only hits the minimums of Cat5e doesn't meet the specs for 10GbaseT, but the specs for 10G are for cabling in a dense conduit with a total run of 100m. In a residential setting, you likely don't have dense conduit or there's only a small section with dense cabling, where it leaves the patch panel. Additionally, cables are often exceed the spec they claim on their jacket, especially when there were not higher specs defined when made. My house was cabled with cat5e in 2003 or so, and I run 10g along one segment joining two buildings without significant error counts. My systems lack the tuning to really use that bandwidth, and I don't have a real usecase, but I wanted to see if it works, and it does. I've also run gigE over a segment with a mix of cat5e and cat3 at my previous residence, because pulling a new cable would have been onerous; and 100M would have been acceptable if gigE didn't work. I'm not sure that cat5e will work beyond 10G, but 10G seems likely to be good enough for a long time. As of right now, used 10g fiber equipment is significantly less expensive than used 10GbaseT equipment, and there's power/heat savings too, 40GbaseT is going to run really hot.
- Dylan16807 3y ago> the 4-bit-5-bit (4B5B) encoding of 100BASE-TX (Fast Ethernet), which encodes 4 bits of data in 5 bits, which would normally require 125 MHz of bandwidth to transfer, I object to this number. I would say that "normal" here should mean plain old one bit at a time, 125 million times per second. This would make the maximum frequency 62.5Mhz, when it transmits 101010, or more specifically alternating between positive and negative voltage. 10Mbit Ethernet requires 10MHz specifically because it doesn't do the simplest thing. It transmits 20 million times per second. > but the final encoding step of 100BASE-TX is MLT-3 (Multi-Level Transmit), which as the name suggests cycles between three voltage levels (+1, 0, -1 V). Due to the use of MLT-3, to reach the effective data rate of 100 Mbit/s only a bandwidth of 31.25 MHz is required rather than 125 MHz. I would clarify that MLT-3 has four steps in the cycle. +1v, 0v, -1v, 0v again. So that way it cuts 62.5 in half to 31.25. > can technically use 100 MHz Cat-5e wiring courtesy of its 100 MHz bandwidth requirement, this assumes flawless wiring It assumes flawless wiring if you go for maximum distance, which is not particularly common.
- snarfy 3y agoWhen you find that 100M box of cat6 on Amazon sold by PQUALOOOX for 1/4 of the price of everyone else, it's probably cat5 construction and made of copper clad aluminum wiring.
- widforss 3y agoI recently bought patch cables for the first time in maybe a decade. I ended up with with a Cat6a U/FTP, but the process to find out was the current "OK" cable standard was very confusing. Apparently there is a lot of "Cat7" cables that do not adhere to the standard (which do not allow for RJ45's?), which made it hard to find out what was what. Not that it matters, this was a 5 m cable between my fiber box and my new wireless router. So the cable will not be the bottleneck in any of this.
- klysm 3y agoPerhaps you are alluding to the connectors also having to be rated?