CAT5e or CAT6 cable?

[chittnp]

Planning on re-wiring my fraternity house soon, and I was wondering which cable you guys reccomend I go with, cat 5e or cat 6. I was also wondering if cat5e connectors will work with cat 6 cable, or if it needs its own connectors. thanks!!

[CarRamrod]

Category 6 (ANSI/TIA/EIA-568-B.2-1) was ratified by the TIA/EIA in June 2002. CAT-6 provides higher performance than CAT-5e and features more stringent specifications for crosstalk and system noise. All CAT-6 components are backward compatible with CAT5e, CAT5, and Category 3. If different category components are used with higher category components, then the channel will be limited to the performance of the lower category. Using all Category 6 components throughout the signal path should result in a Power-Sum Attenuation-to-Crosstalk Ratio (PS-ACR) that is greater than or equal to zero at 200 MHz.

Oops...forgot the website I got this from. Hope it helps though.

[AMD Phreak]

Cat6 will provide more headroom for gigE transmissions and future technologies than cat5e will. If you have the cash to spare use cat6 with cat6 connectors and everything. If money is of concern, then use the best enhanced cat5e and connectors that you can afford. Cable from Berk-Tek or Commscope is my personal favorite.

[Vio1]

Either one will last you years. The cat6 is better but i seriously doubt you need it, or will need it any time soon. If its not a lot more, and you have the money, then get it, otherwise, you wont notice a difference.

[chittnp]

well, the problem Im running into is that the hardware (connectors and tombstones) for cat6 are a bit harder to come by, and we're not gonna use gigabit anything for the foreseeable future, so cat 5e will do I suppose, thanks to all that responded.