CAT5 vs CW1308

Are there any figures for using CW1308 telephone cable (2-pair or 4-pair) for data, where CAT5 should have been used?

I'm interested in distance and speed.

Thanks.

Cheers!

(Officially)
it would be 1Base5 (aka StarLAN at 1Mbps) for up to 250m. But you probably won't find any NIC for that.
while 10Base-T (10Mbps) for up to 100m required minimum Cat 3.

There are various LAN extenders that can run over phone quality pairs (VDSL for example) or similar for coax
and it's not cheap, but as they can go longer distances and over legacy cable they sometimes have their uses.

Edited by prlzx (Thu 10-Jun-21 19:09:57)

StarLAN. Crikey I never saw that in the wild! For me it was either loads of thick coax 10base5, then Thinnet took off about the same time that IBM Type 1 was popular for the Token Ring groupies. Then we ripped all that out and along came Cat 3, Cat5 rapidly supplanted by Cat5e yada, yada structured cabling revolution took hold. My early career in the nineties!

As said, not officially supported for anything LAN data standard remotely modern/still in use. I reckon you'd struggle to get it to Cat3 (for 10BaseT).

Anyhow what lengths are we talking, and roughly what's the age/vintage of the cable?

In reply to a post by Ancient_Mariner:

Are there any figures for using CW1308 telephone cable (2-pair or 4-pair) for data, where CAT5 should have been used?

I'm interested in distance and speed.

Thanks.

Cheers!

I used a de-commissioned length of CW1308 in my lad's student digs to give him a LAN feed from the router three stories down. Worked fine at 100 Mb/s, only really needed it to work at 10 Mb/s (ADSL days !)

Various lengths, say 10 to 15 metres max; although some much less.
Installed during full rewire of house in 2002. It is all copper, none of this 'copper covered steel'.

I'm looking for a future solution for post PSTN shutdown, so in the main speed will be whatever a digital phone needs.

Cheers!

That sounds promising! Thanks.

Cheers!

At least I won't need that sort of distance. 10 to 15 metres max.

Cheers!

If it was rewired in 2002 did anyone run coax for TV/Sat distribution?

Edited by prlzx (Thu 10-Jun-21 21:00:23)

In reply to a post by Ancient_Mariner:

Various lengths, say 10 to 15 metres max; although some much less.
Installed during full rewire of house in 2002. It is all copper, none of this 'copper covered steel'.

I'm looking for a future solution for post PSTN shutdown, so in the main speed will be whatever a digital phone needs.

Cheers!

Can you please clarify, when you say 'digital phone' connection from what to what precisely please?