Cat 5E means no 10G?

My LAN is Cat 5E Ethernet, it's in the walls. I think that means I'm limited to gigabit Ethernet, if I wanted 10G I'd need Cat 6 cables (and switches etc).

Is that right, I don't need to bother myself about XGS-PON cos my LAN ain't fat enough?

You can get 2.5Gb on Cat 5e

Depends how long the runs are. There's no reason why a quality Cat5e run of say 20m won't get to 10Gb.

In reply to a post by Woolwich:

Is that right, I don't need to bother myself about XGS-PON cos my LAN ain't fat enough?

Don’t align the WAN technology with your LAN.

My local alt-net is installing XGS-PON but only providing a 900/900 service, using Adtran ONTs with 1GbE ports. So there is little point me bothering with anything above 2.5 GbE in my home.

In reply to a post by jpm:

Depends how long the runs are. There's no reason why a quality Cat5e run of say 20m won't get to 10Gb.

Cross talk is the problem, so I have read, that is what may stop it getting up to that speed.

My partner had a pretty long run of cat 5e, about 25 meters, and that did 2.5Gb/s ok.

No: Cat5e is *certified* for 2.5Gbps at 100m. This is one of the reasons the 2.5G-baseT standard exists.

In short, Cat5e will be good for a long time yet, so don't fret.

Even if one day you decide you *must* have an Internet service faster than 2.5G, you can still run separate 2.5G connections to each wired device and each wireless access point, and the aggregate traffic can exceed 2.5G.

Unless the cable is poop and has been installed poorly it'll almost certainly be fine for 10GbE across the kinds of cable lengths you'll have at home.

If it's problematic the first thing to do is recrimp the connectors. That'll probably sort it.

You don't have to bother overly with XGSPON right now as Openreach, the folks bringing you FTTP, don't offer it. They offer GPON and a 2.5GbE ONT which your cabling will do easily as long as it isn't broken.

Edited by XGS_Is_On (Thu 04-Apr-24 10:58:29)

In reply to a post by XGS_Is_On:

You don't have to bother overly with XGSPON right now as Openreach, the folks bringing you FTTP, don't offer it. They offer GPON and a 2.5GbE ONT which your cabling will do easily as long as it isn't broken.

To be honest I shouldn't have said XGS-PON but 10G in general. Before I get XGS-PON (still on FTTC!) I might want to get a new NAS and the question is should I look at 10G capable ones. The general answer (thanks all) is maybe that won't be a total waste of cash. I'm going to assume if the cable run will max out a 2.5G that wouldn't worry a 10G NAS.

The cable is whatever the builders put in. I can see it says it's Cat 5E but can't pull enough though to see a manufacturer. It won't be any old cheap [censored] from Amazon though. I fitted my own Ethernet sockets so I know they're all properly punched down and in Cat 6 sockets. I think my longest runs won't be more than 10 or 20 metres (I saw the cables before the plasterboard went on), well within any limits anyway. I don't live in a castle!

As the others have said, 2.5Gb is there and pretty cheap, I just upgraded my entire setup at home, installed 4 2.5Gb switches in various locations and swapped out the NIC on my NAS for a 2.5 PCI-E Card.

All my cabling is cat5e and some of the runs are pretty long going through a few terminations, either at a wall socket or RJ45 end. The switches I have also have 10Gb SFP ports and I managed to get 10Gb working using 30m Transceivers, I was able to uplink two switches together using 10Gb, however it was kinda pointless and the transceivers were generating a crazy amount of heat.

I wasnt able to get 10Gbit though on one cat5e run because the feed was going from the switch via one cat5e cable, into a female wallsocket which is linked to another female wall socket, the two are linked with cat5e and then finally out of that socket into the switch.

As much as it will do 10Gb over a given length the conditions have to be optimal, so millage may vary but its definitely possible

Dont sweat it though, 2.5Gb is quite the upgrade over 1Gb and cost waaaay less to get up and running.

In reply to a post by Woolwich:

To be honest I shouldn't have said XGS-PON but 10G in general. Before I get XGS-PON (still on FTTC!) I might want to get a new NAS and the question is should I look at 10G capable ones. The general answer (thanks all) is maybe that won't be a total waste of cash. I'm going to assume if the cable run will max out a 2.5G that wouldn't worry a 10G NAS.

I'd be inclined to place your NAS and 10G switch next to the router, or wherever the central point is that all the Cat5e cables congregate.

2.5Gbps is 300MB/sec. Unless you're doing editing of lots of raw videos, that's likely to be plenty (and it's hard to tune a PC or laptop to copy files any faster than that anyway)

In reply to a post by candlerb:

(and it's hard to tune a PC or laptop to copy files any faster than that anyway)

Windows can be an utter pain for transfers above this. Even with smb3.0.

In reply to a post by candlerb:

No: Cat5e is *certified* for 2.5Gbps at 100m. This is one of the reasons the 2.5G-baseT standard exists.

Fair enough, but everything i have seen about cat 5E, they say, Cat5e provides speeds of up to 1GBASE-T or 1-Gigabit Ethernet or something like that. I have not seen anything about cat5E being certified to cope with 2.5Gb/s

In short, Cat5e will be good for a long time yet, so don't fret.

Even if one day you decide you *must* have an Internet service faster than 2.5G, you can still run separate 2.5G connections to each wired device and each wireless access point, and the aggregate traffic can exceed 2.5G.

I am not worried, I have no reason to go anything faster than 1Gb/s, my broadband is only half that speed and once contract is out will be even lower, my nas is only 1Gb/s and I so are my computers.

I am fine with 1Gb/s it does me.

In reply to a post by zyborg47:

Fair enough, but everything i have seen about cat 5E, they say, Cat5e provides speeds of up to 1GBASE-T or 1-Gigabit Ethernet or something like that. I have not seen anything about cat5E being certified to cope with 2.5Gb/s

You're seeing people right now in this thread telling you otherwise.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2.5GBASE-T_and_5GBASE-...

In reply to a post by zyborg47:

Fair enough, but everything i have seen about cat 5E, they say, Cat5e provides speeds of up to 1GBASE-T or 1-Gigabit Ethernet or something like that.

Because things change. New ideas appear and older cable standards are reviewed to see if they can be used for the new idea. So check the date on technology information; if not dated assume it WAS correct and we now know more.

It doesn't mean the source was wrong when written.

In reference to wikipedia:

On September 23, 2016, the IEEE-SA Standards Board approved IEEE Std 802.3bz-2016

the standard is 8 years old this September, i wonder why Adrian didn't check for newer sources

In reply to a post by jpm:

You're seeing people right now in this thread telling you otherwise.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2.5GBASE-T_and_5GBASE-...

Don't mean the people in this thread are correct, I am not saying they are not, but sometimes you just got to look around.

In reply to a post by jchamier:

Because things change. New ideas appear and older cable standards are reviewed to see if they can be used for the new idea. So check the date on technology information; if not dated assume it WAS correct and we now know more.

It doesn't mean the source was wrong when written.

That is true, but not sure how Cat 5E or any Ethernet cable can change, maybe made with better materials. The technology is still the same as it was.
Maybe I am looking at this wrong.
The best way is to suck it and see. As I said if this was my house I would put fibre in the walls and under the floors and have fibre sockets. Not because i need it, but because it is the way to go.
One reason why my partner did it, she decided it was the best way to go, even if a bit pricy.

In reply to a post by zyborg47:

Maybe I am looking at this wrong.

Indeed you are.

The Cat5e standard is unchanged, but the 2.5G-baseT standard was designed *specifically* so it would work over Cat5e - so you could get faster speeds without having to recable.

In reply to a post by candlerb:

In reply to a post by zyborg47:

Maybe I am looking at this wrong.

Indeed you are.

The Cat5e standard is unchanged, but the 2.5G-baseT standard was designed *specifically* so it would work over Cat5e - so you could get faster speeds without having to recable.

Exactly and if you look at the spec you can work out pretty quickly how they did it ..

In reply to a post by zyborg47:

Don't mean the people in this thread are correct, I am not saying they are not, but sometimes you just got to look around.

Agreed, always check your sources. For computer networking the IEEE is the authority. You may have to pay to read some standards.

For IT topics often Wikipedia is very good as IT people keep them up to date, but generally I use information from wikipedia sparingly.

Tbf it does happen to most of us. At one stage, it was advisable to install the same amount of memory in each channel in ddr system so that they could both be written/read to at the same time. I didn't know that there an update to this to allow asynchronous mode on memory channels so you could still have combined read/write regardless of different memory sizes. I swore blind that this was wrong until i checked and found out about the updated spec.

In reply to a post by zyborg47:

That is true, but not sure how Cat 5E or any Ethernet cable can change, maybe made with better materials. The technology is still the same as it was.
Maybe I am looking at this wrong.

Yup. The cables are classified by how much bandwidth they can carry, RF bandwidth. 5e is certified for 100 MHz. You look at a cable alongside category it may have a number with MHz at the end. It doesn't care what goes into that 100 MHz, it's a cable. As long as signal to noise is okay it doesn't matter.

A while back your phone line only carried dialup. Then it carried ADSL. Cable didn't change, use of it did.

To add to this thread, I setup my new NUC last night, and used the cable I had to hastily find for the Cityfibre install, this is at best a cat 5e cable and its connecting at 2.5gig.

In reply to a post by zyborg47:

In reply to a post by jchamier:

Because things change. New ideas appear and older cable standards are reviewed to see if they can be used for the new idea. So check the date on technology information; if not dated assume it WAS correct and we now know more.

It doesn't mean the source was wrong when written.

That is true, but not sure how Cat 5E or any Ethernet cable can change, maybe made with better materials. The technology is still the same as it was.
Maybe I am looking at this wrong.
The best way is to suck it and see. As I said if this was my house I would put fibre in the walls and under the floors and have fibre sockets. Not because i need it, but because it is the way to go.
One reason why my partner did it, she decided it was the best way to go, even if a bit pricy.

This is an older thread, so apologies all, but I'm catching up on some forums posts whilst I've been absent here aa few months.

Unless you live/work in the networking space, then I'd expect when the IEEE decided, in the middle of the last decade, that they needed to bump up Ethernet speeds on *existing* cabling infrastructure, the news didn't exactly make the front page of the newspapers here (or anywhere!). So fair enough that it may have passed you by.

As pointed out its now 8 years since that 2.5G/5G 802.3bz standard was ratified by the IEEE and it was specifically created, in their words:

"...to meet growing capacity demands on more than 70 billion meters of Category 5e and Category 6 cabling"

In other words, there's a metric shedload of 'legacy' Cat5e (which in itself is now about 30 years old!! as far as standards go, not IEEE but TIA/EIA and the equivalent Class D in ISO-land) cable out there, we better leverage this. They did so pretty quickly actually and the standard 'only' took them 18 months to get stamped up from inception. Not bad, it usually takes far, far longer to get agreement and buy in on any standards stuff.

So yeah. Nothing at all about the existing installed base of cabling was changed - they literally, as they saying goes, just changed the bits that hang off the ends 😅

Edited by Pheasant (Sun 20-Oct-24 09:22:33)