Nice! I must have more interference as the extra shielding of Cat 7/8 makes a big difference in this house.
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Yep, 3 level home (including basement) with the primary switch in said basement (still not a humongous home by any means). Just made more sense to just go with 6A throughout when buying the cable in bulk vs buying different types for different locations given that I did want the 10Gbps capability at some point. Only my NAS has 10Gbps NIC at this point, but it's loads easier to replace a switch than pull new cable.
I still don't think individual devices need to be 10Gbps capable any time in the near future (meaning the majority of your switch ports can still be 1Gbps), but I believe the infrastructure should (uplinks between switches and such). For example, if at some point in the future, I'm streaming 2Gbps over 4 devices on a single switch upstairs, I would want that switch uplink to be 10Gbps. Probably back to something like this: UniFi Switch Aggregation – Ubiquiti Inc. (which is only $269 for 8 10Gbps ports).
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Given your application, I would definately go with 6a. However just like with Cat5 and fast ethernet, you are still limited to 100m runs. You may need repeaters in the signal chain for longer runs.
When I was younger, I wanted a big multi story home. Now, I am perfectly happy with a not tiny, not huge ranch style house... No stairs to deal with as I get older...
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Along with choice of cable, I would give some consideration to the optimal placement of networking gear. Ideally you would like to have your modem, network switch (at least the main one), and your NAS (if you use one). In the same room or in locations where it is easy to run cable between the two locations. If you see these locations as being somewhat apart, I would run a conduit between these locations, so you can easily run cable between them in the future. These design considerations are easily done when building, not so easy after the fact.
IMHO, gigabit ethernet (cat 5e, cat 6 if you want a little higher quality cable), is more than sufficient for a home. When I stream a 4K, 60fps, 10 bit color bluray .iso over my network the maximum speed is around 110 Mbit/second, this is no where near 1000 Mbit/second (gigabit), so there is a lot of headroom, even if everything goes 8K.
The only potential bottlenecks I see in the system, are between the modem, the main switch, and the NAS. If you have internet speeds beyond 1000 Mbit/second (gigabit) you need to connect your modem to your main switch with cable capable of more than gigabit speed if you want to take advantage of the speed of your internet service. (Currently, I only have 600 Mbit/second, but these speeds are getting faster year by year, so....). Also, if you use a NAS, it is nice to have speeds between the NAS/modem/and main switch be as fast as this gear supports. That is why I suggest, you design a home so this gear is in the same room, or alternatively run a conduit between the rooms that will house the location of these devices. When it is easy and quick to upgrade the cable between these devices, there is no real need to worry about future proofing. For all other cable considerations to end devices, cat5e, cat6 is sufficient. (IMHO)
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LOL...so are we. We have a modest (by today's standards) ranch as well that we are retiring in. No stairs and no long walks from one end of a giant house to the other.
If only I could have stopped my wife from her master bedroom remodel/addition project things would be perfect. Thanks to her my walk from our bed to the kitchen will be about 20' or so feet longer than it used to be when she's done. That's a longer wait for my Cheetos, which I feel is really unfortunate. 
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Slippery slope for sure. Cat 6 will take you to retirement but...
Everything we do at work for new installs is fibre and no one has even mentioned the "real" future.
It's relatively cheap and it's the industry standard for transport/backhaul.
Running copper? You have to ask yourself, "Do I feel Lucky, well do I , Punk?" 
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I am surprised by the number of responses that say not worry about your bandwidth. The Cat5 cables I installed only 2 decades ago are now inadequate. Data generation and consumption continue to rise at a dramatic rate, and nobody is predicting it will stop growing.
Cat 6a is the MINIMUM. If you can afford it, go even better.
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Nothing is guaranteed to be futureproof if you are looking beyond 5-10 years.
I just went through and upgraded a lot of my home cabling from CAT5e to CAT6. I am using gigabit ethernet for most of my stuff, so CAT5e is adequate, but CAT6 will provide greater resistance to noise. Along with all the WiFi, Bluetooth, Zigbee, and Z wave RF, I am also a ham radio operator, so noise shielding is good.
My Netgear router and one of my computers can handle 2gig ethernet connections, but I have cable Internet that is currently limited to about 100 MB, so there is no need for 2 gig at this point.
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Fibre
I suspect that 10gb will be widely available relatively soon for coax. It doesn't really require much hardware for the provider to achieve and it puts pressure on wireless and DSL providers to adapt or be obsolete. The big DSL and fiber providers will have more capital investment costs to push out fiber but is capable of competing. I suspect fiber rollouts will be much slower than coax deployments though.
ARRIS
“ARRIS has been developing the building blocks that are the foundation for 10G for several years, providing the ability to gracefully evolve today’s networks to support multi-gig symmetrical services. Early technology trials have been very promising and will mature very quickly this year,” said Bruce McClelland, ARRIS CEO.
Charter
“We are entering a new age of digital innovation that will require networks that can deliver high speed, massive capacity and low latency,” said Tom Rutledge, Chairman and CEO of Charter Communications. “The cable industry’s 10G platform will be the platform of choice for the innovators and developers of the future technologies and applications that will create and inspire the way we work, live, educate and entertain.”
Comcast
“This initiative demonstrates our continued leadership in broadband, where today we provide the fastest speeds,the most advanced Wi-Fi,and the broadest deployment of gigabit Internet service, now available to tens of millions of homes,” said Dave Watson, President and CEO of Comcast Cable. “10 gigabit technologies will open the doors to an almost unimaginable future of innovation paving the way for an entirely new generation of exciting applications and experiences.”
Cox
“There’s no better place to introduce the 10G initiative than CES – the world’s largest showcase of current and future technologies,” said Pat Esser, President of Cox Communications. “Many of the innovative visions being discussed here will require the kind of exceptional technology platform that our industry will deliver with 10G.”
Liberty Global
“While the world is talking about 5G, we’re proud to be part of this extraordinary movement to 10G. We’re already launching entire Gigicities and that’s just the start,” commented Mike Fries, CEO and Vice Chairman of Liberty Global. “We’re building a network that leverages the strategic advantage that DOCSIS 3.1 brings, and we’re excited to utilize this world-class platform to provide a 1G to 10G playbook that will fuel innovation and the economy of the future.”
Rogers Communications
“The industry is at the cusp of a technological transformation as we move beyond super high speeds, to introduce ultra-high capacity and ultra-low latency that will open up a whole new world of possibilities for consumers and businesses,” said Jorge Fernandes, CTIO, Rogers Communications. “10G broadband is an instrumental technology for 5G as it will be the critical, unified backbone that connects our wireless, broadband and enterprise networks.”
SCTE•ISBE
“The introduction of 10G positions our industry as the foundation for innovations that will transform the lives of consumers and businesses,” said Mark Dzuban, President and CEO of SCTE•ISBE. “As the industry’s applied science arm, SCTE•ISBE is working in concert with NCTA and CableLabs to develop training, standards and operational practices that optimize time-to-market and performance, and to fuel SCTE•ISBE Cable-Tec Expo’s role as the pivotal venue for 10G thought leadership.”
Shaw Communications
“We are pleased to be part of the 10G journey with CableLabs and its members to enable the fast broadband speeds that will be critical to how our customers live and how our economy grows,” said Zoran Stakic, COO and CTO, Shaw Communications. “Connectivity fuels the lives of our customers, businesses, and communities, and leveraging CableLabs’ research and innovation has already allowed us to efficiently double the speeds of our fastest plans to more than 4 million homes across 94 percent of our footprint. We will continue to work with CableLabs as we push to make faster broadband speeds economically feasible and broadly available across Western Canada.”
Taiwan Broadband Communications
“As one of the leading cable operators in Asia and one of the first to enable gigabit technology, we are excited to be a part of the next big step for broadband in delivering wide scale deployment of gigabit broadband across Taiwan where TBC operates,” said Jimmy Chen, CEO of TBC. “Moving forward, in line with global trends, we are of the view that 10G is the innovative solution and path forward for surpassing our customers’ demands for next-generation content delivery and connectivity.”
Telecom Argentina
“10G represents a tremendous commitment to furthering broadband innovation by the global industry, and one we are proud to be a part of,” said Carlos Moltini, CEO of Telecom Argentina. “As we continue on the path of evolving broadband services across Argentina, we are looking forward to enabling both new experiences and the development of new products and services with technologies that will enable the convergence of our fixed and mobile networks. As a mobile operator, Telecom will rely on 10G as we deploy our own next-generation networks through close integration with 10G fixed networks to enable our new wireless infrastructure.”
Vodafone Germany
"We are thrilled to support the vision and development of 10G as we roll out gigabit broadband services across Germany and we are already offering gigabit service to more than 6 million homes in Germany by year-end and nearly all of our 13 million homes by the end of 2020,” said Manuel Cubero, CCO, Vodafone Germany. “As technologies within the cable industry progress, we look forward to paving the way for multi-gigabit broadband and unparalleled content experiences in Germany.”
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IMHO, good network design will usually trump, higher bandwidth cable. In a well designed home network, any of the cables that serve one end device will be sufficiently served now and in the future by cat5e (gigabit). Does anyone really see a time when Hubitat will require an ethernet connection into the hub that is faster than gigabit? LOL.
I have known a few people who were not happy with the performance of their "gigabit" cabling and wanted to upgrade cable. The issue was not the cable but rather poor network design. In the picture below, the cable in red is the cable you would want to upgrade beyond cat5e and even beyond cat6, but if you plan for these devices to be in the same room (or in rooms connected by conduit) then upgrading cable is easy and you don't have to worry about what to "put in the walls".
For ethernet cable to end devices (black cable in picture), gigabit is plenty. To put this in perspective think of streaming netflix ultrahd or apple tv+ to an end device. This has a speed a little less than 50 Mbits/second, a far cry from gigabit (1000 Mbit/second). In the real world (at least my home), I typically get around 900 Mbit/second between my end devices on my home gigabit network (cat5e cable). When I stream a 4K HDR bluray (ripped .iso image) from my NAS to my home theatre, I am only at 110 Mbits/second, way less than the cables capacity. PC gaming/console gaming is even less bandwidth intensive, and everything else I do on an end device is way, way, less than that.
There is a huge need for cable that has a bandwidth greater than gigabit, but not from a switch to a single end device. My advice would be to worry more about good network design, in my experience I have seen some poorly thought out networking (cable and device layout) between routers, NAS, switches, and end devices and the poor performance was not due to the cable's bandwidth capabilities.
Side Note: I would definitely like the speed between my router, NAS, and switch to be as fast as my internet connection (currently 600Mbit/second). I don't think it will be long before I have an internet connection beyond gigabit. When this happens I will upgrade the cabling between my router, NAS, and switch to make sure I can write a file from the internet to my NAS at the maximum speed my internet can achieve. It would be nice to download 100 GB UHD Blu-ray rips a little quicker. But after they are downloaded, streaming to my home theatre is easily handled by cat5e cable.
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Just curious.....in the network diagram why is there a 2nd switch for the Hubitat hub? Is it due to length considerations?
No, LOL. It's actually not a diagram of my own network, I just grabbed an internet pic of network design, and changed some cables to red, to illustrate the concept in my post. I added a second switch cause some people use them, and if you do use them, you would want to be able to upgrade that cable. Then I added the hubitat to the pic for fun and as a nod to hubitat.
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Well yeah, 20-year-old original Cat-5 (not Enhanced) is only rated for 350Mb. It was obsoleted by the enhanced Cat-5E. I didn't see anybody recommending the original Cat-5.
Cat-5E is good for 1Gb which is still plenty viable for years to come. With switched networks, each device gets its own bandwidth. 1Gb to each TV , PC, streaming device, etc. Having a 10G internet or NAS doesn't mean each device has to be 10G
Nothing wrong with Cat6 for new installs, but there is no reason in the 'near' future to rip out all the 5E just to replace it with 6
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We have a 3 story house. The one thing I wish was done was to have a few 1" or larger "empty" conduits from attic to basement. Plastic conduit is only a few bucks per 10 foot section, so this really shouldn't cost much (particularly if you are leaving them empty so it isn't really an "electrician" job, but just your contractor). This gives you a degree of future proofing as you can then have an easier time running wire to the attic (from which its generally an easy drop through a wall if needed in the future), or to the basement (which, again, an easy from first floor walls to the basement if needed). Fortunately for us, all the rooms have Cat 5e which is fine (at least until there's a big drop in price for 10 GPS switches and until that becomes standard on computers!).
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Big believer in this too and something I added during renovations to my home. I now have a way to get a new cable from the crawl space to the attic this came in handy when I cut cable and went with a digital antenna as I was able to make a coax run to the attic for an antenna pretty easily.
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Cat-5 is rated for 100Mb (not 350Mb). My point was and is, that what seemed incredibly fast 20 years ago, is obsolete, today. We can't even imagine what new technologies and massive amounts of data will be needed in another 20 years. You may live in this house for another 30 years. The house may live for another 80 years. So if you would like to remain future-proof, I would recommend going as fast as you can afford.
And by all means, put it inside some conduit so you can easily replace it, when even the fastest thing you can afford, becomes obsolete.
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In 20 years, we will have nano-machines that will build the wires in our walls for us, for those cases where our terabit wireless connection are not fast enough…
Now in 20 years, I will be able to point to his post and say: See, I knew this is how it would be! (Or ignore it completely if something completely different occurs…)
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I appreciate good network design, too. But I will generally disagree with your point(s).
- Good network design is based on the current and projected needs. The good network designers generally suck at predicting the future. In my case, 20+ years ago, I ran a single cable from the Hub (prior to Switches) to a Study. At that time, 20+ years ago, that single cable was entirely adequate for my single PC. However, unpredictably, my data needs in that Study increased exponentially over the years. What was once a single PC, is now 3 PC's, 2 printers, a streaming TV, a weather station, multiple WiFi IOT devices, and more are sure to come. The Study now has its own 12 port Switch that is connected to what is now inadequate cabling. Had I projected, 20+ years ago, that my home would need 20 times the number of connections, and 100+ times the amount of data, I might have designed the network differently.
- The network design does not last as long as the cable. And by network, I mean the Switches, Routers, Modems, NAS, UPS, etc. I have replaced all of these items several times in the last 20 years. The cable has outlived the other network infrastructure many times over.
- Hardware is cheap and getting faster and cheaper every day. Network design (smart people) are expensive and getting more expensive every day. At the small office/Home scale, you can throw a lot of hardware at a problem for relatively little money, but the cable is expensive to replace.
true, Cat-5 was rated for 100Mb ETHERNET, but don't forget that it was originally marketed as the 'one cable that can carry everything' voice, video, and data. I was being generous because the original Cat5 could be used to run faster protocols like RS485, IEEE1394, and ATM that were thought back then to be the future beyond 100Mb Fast Ethernet.
Of course we now know that Ethernet protocol continued to evolve and is the de-facto protocol carrying data, voice, and video. But still keep in mind that Cat-5/6/7 cables are not limited to just Ethernet
