Engineer is installing it now. No trouble, nice lad, putting it around the side of my house.

The modem indoors is actually tiny. Originally I wanted it under the desk, but because I was worried they wouldn’t do it, I made room under the stairs where my pc was (couldn’t move the desk as it has loads of wires wrapped around the back legs). However he said it was absolutely fine putting it under the desk, it only requires a couple of screws to put on the wall.

So all good, will probably be finished in a 30 minutes now. Will do a speed test and post my results back here once it’s down. My only regret is ordering a 3m cat 7 cable from Amazon coming today, as that’s what I needed if he was going to put it next to the desk/where the pc was, but now I can use a 1.5m cat 6 I already have.

So so far it’s all good.

Just for reference, there's no point buying cat7 anyway.

cat5e = good for 1 gigabit at up to 100m
cat6 = good for 1 gigabit at up to 100m; also good for 10 gigabits at up to 55m
cat6a = good for 1 gigabit at up to 100m; also good for 10 gigabits at up to 100m
cat7 = not a recognised TIA/EIA standard, and no benefit over cat6a

👍 I agree with your points. I’d also add zero point buying a shielded patch lead. At least here in the UK. Different perhaps in continental Europe.

Minor point, whilst fair to say Cat 7 was never ratified by the TIA/EIA it was actually ratified by the ISO/IEC under the parallel 11801 structured cabling standard (11801 and the TIA/EIA standards were “twinned” for decades - TIA/EIA refer to ‘categories’ whilst ISO/IEC 11801 talks about ‘classes’)

Some chatter below from the good folk at Fluke about Cat 7...

https://www.flukenetworks.com/blog/cabling-chronicle...

Shall we talk about Category 8 🤣?

Well they're nearly all as cheap as each other for the ones I get (amazon basics), it was only £6.70 for 3m, and is currently cheaper than the cat 6 3m amazon basics cable (£10.49). Thing is I only ordered a cat 7 cause I didn't think I had any cat 6's at the 3m length, but then realize I did have one when looking today. And at the end of the day I ended up using a 1.5m cable that came with my router anyway. I'm up to my eyeballs with cables these days.

One other thing to note is apparently this BT fibre will be able to support 10Gbs in the future, so at least I'll be able to use that cable one day probably in a decade lol

As for my speeds, I was getting between 250-350mb, so I wasn't happy. I tried a different cable, no luck. So I try the talktalk router instead of my Asus router, and now I'm getting full 500mb speeds, and 70mb upload.

Which was then annoying because I wanted to use my asus router for accessing my own cloud via aidisk. And guess what, can't do it cause it's a private WAN (connect lan from talktalk to WAN in asus router), so the asus DDNS thing doesn't work. As luck would have it, after forwarding my asus router IP with DMZ on the talktalk router, I can still access my files via IP address, and I tested resetting the modem, and it seems to be static IP, so I'm cushdy. And after much testing, the asus router seems to be operating fine for connecting devices to it wireless or lan and routing, so I just ended up disabling the wifi on the talktalk.

Anyway so much unnecessary detail, but it's a bit of a shame I had to setup both routers cause my new asus router couldn't get up to 500mb, but I'm just happy it's all working and setup now.

Edited by deleted (Wed 17-Mar-21 13:45:28)

I don't know how Amazon can get away with such ludicrously high pricing for a commodity item. At fs.com, a single 3m CAT5e patch cable is £2.20; CAT6 £2.90. (However, you have to pay postage on orders under £79)

Even if Cat7 is ratified by the ISO/IEC it means jack if the IEEE don't ratify an 802.3 standard for actually using it, which fun fact they have not. In addition the only IEEE 802.3 standard for Cat8 is limited to 30m requires special connectors (as does Cat7) and is intended for data centre usage in racks at 40Gbps.

Frankly the chances of you seeing any actual deployment of 40GBase-T (802.3bq) is around ħ because we either use direct attach cables which are cheaper, and lower powered or we just use actual fibre. Well in my personal experience that's what we do,

Hell even 10GBaseT is virtual none existent in the data centre because it would be a right royal pain in the backside to use. I would have to buy really expensive 10GBase-T SFP+'s to put in my switches and I would be limited to 30m anyway. Frankly I would look to replace any 10GBaseT network card with an SFP+ based one first.

In reply to a post by candlerb:

Just for reference, there's no point buying cat7 anyway.

cat5e = good for 1 gigabit at up to 100m
cat6 = good for 1 gigabit at up to 100m; also good for 10 gigabits at up to 55m
cat6a = good for 1 gigabit at up to 100m; also good for 10 gigabits at up to 100m
cat7 = not a recognised TIA/EIA standard, and no benefit over cat6a

Note that NBaseT brings some additional options

Cat5e = good for 2.5Gbps up to 100m and also probably good for 5Gbps up to 55m
Cat6 = good for 2.5Gbps up to 100m and also good for 5Gbps up to 100m.

In reply to a post by jabuzzard:

Hell even 10GBaseT is virtual none existent in the data centre because it would be a right royal pain in the backside to use. I would have to buy really expensive 10GBase-T SFP+'s to put in my switches and I would be limited to 30m anyway. Frankly I would look to replace any 10GBaseT network card with an SFP+ based one first.

For datacentre use it is pretty pointless.

There are some niche use cases for 10GBase-T in broadcast/media production settings where it actually makes sense over DACs... for example a major event press centre, rows of hot desks for photographers/cameramen to plug their laptop with 10G dongle in and upload.

Edit: but we are well off topic now.

Edited by ft247 (Wed 14-Apr-21 15:07:30)

In reply to a post by jabuzzard:

Even if Cat7 is ratified by the ISO/IEC it means jack if the IEEE don't ratify an 802.3 standard for actually using it, which fun fact they have not. In addition the only IEEE 802.3 standard for Cat8 is limited to 30m requires special connectors (as does Cat7) and is intended for data centre usage in racks at 40Gbps.

Frankly the chances of you seeing any actual deployment of 40GBase-T (802.3bq) is around ħ because we either use direct attach cables which are cheaper, and lower powered or we just use actual fibre. Well in my personal experience that's what we do,

Hell even 10GBaseT is virtual none existent in the data centre because it would be a right royal pain in the backside to use. I would have to buy really expensive 10GBase-T SFP+'s to put in my switches and I would be limited to 30m anyway. Frankly I would look to replace any 10GBaseT network card with an SFP+ based one first.

Not necessarily advocating Cat7 cabling (or Cat8!), datacenter out otherwise, just merely indicating the divergence between the 11801 ISO/IEC cabling standards and the TIA/EIA 568 cabling standards - which up until Category 6 / Class E the Europeans and Americans, were pretty much aligned in their twisted pair cabling standards whether it be stateside 'Categories' or the Euro/ISO based 'Classes'.

Category 7 was always a 'shielded' led standard - driven ny the continental predilection for such cabling. In USA, (as in OZ/NZ and the good old UK), unshielded copper has always been historically dominant - at least that was my experience working in that part of the industry up until the early noughties. Nothing much really changed since then.

In any event Cat 6a does enough (for me at least) running 10 Gbps up to 100m. Beyond that fibre all the way!

Hello!
Quick question - does anyone know what Authentication method TalkTalk FutureFibre 500 uses please? Is it PPPoE or IPoE? I have a UniFi USG router and wondering if I can use it with TalkTalk, it only supports PPPoE AFAICT, and I am worried TalkTalk uses IPoE. Any ideas anyone please?