I sincerely doubt that’s what @Stephan.J was saying.
I believe the point was that 15 years later, Cat5e still meets the needs of a home that consumes a decent amount of streaming video content (and whatever else contributes to their bandwidth usage).
We can obviously never predict the future, and there could always be developments that exponentially increase the bandwidth needs of average home users (or even super users like many members of this community).
But I’m getting the sense that anything beyond Cat6 is of questionable value for many home users, even trying to look ahead 10+ years.
My 2cents - I'm just drinking my coffee and has thoughts about this thread - A few comments about 1G and 10G being fast enough - I chuckled as I recalled users telling me they would never need more than 640k of Ram...
I also want to point that latency is a really important factor to keep in mind vs pure throughput. To say that someone can't feel the difference between 1MB and 10G is not true - to put it politely. Try it! throttle your internet and refresh this page - You'll know! And keep in mind data continues to expand to fill the void - an old axiom based on Peter Principles.
There will always be a price / performance sweet spot. Few if any of my clients buy the most bleeding edge - it's cheaper to replace cable plant every 5-10 yrs. So - Cat6 is my favorite ATM. A good 10G smart switch with VLAN and SNMP can really make a network pop. A recent 350 4k camera installation at a state prison I designed had a massive load at the monitoring stations and 12 10G switches in the backbone was critical to carry that much content.
Used in conjunction with a downline POE smart switches is a really perfect solution!
My last thought as the coffee is now kicking in, Cabling distance is not a limiting factor any more really. In some cases a great P to P wifi circuit can backbone with speed but give the distance needed, or EOP (powerline) can be used for those shady one of cables that are of great distance. Planet (tm) vendor has some great twisted pair to coax media convertors that will let you get 500M or more AND carry POE! Had a client with a SecCam on the outskirts of their property and that was my final solution for that bizarre need. Fun topic!
No, if you read my post, it was clearly a response to the statement "You can only anticipate the next 5-10 years, if that".
The vast majority of people who installed cat5e cable 15 years ago and adhered to good network design are still completely satisfied with their cables performance. In my earlier post, I made it clear that several cables in a home would want to be upgradable well beyond cat5e, but cables supplying a single device have no need for anything more.
Along with putting many cat5e cables inside the walls of my home 15 years ago. I have done several changes since. These include:
POE ethernet cabling 2 years ago for security cameras, I was having my roof done so it was easy at the time to run the cables to the soffit locations I desired. I ran cat5e cable for this (I had it on hand). My hd cameras have a bitrate of about 8 Mbits/second, so yes, I ran cat5e cable within the last 2 years all over my attic. Each cable serving one hd security camera. I am not worried about a security camera ever needing more bandwidth than one gigabit cable can provide. To put this in perspective, lets consider if each camera required a gigabit of throughput, if I want to store my surveillance video on my NAS, and keep one month of video for the four cameras, how much storage space do you think it would require? The answer is 1300 Terabytes, (my NAS is only 60 Terabytes). Goes to show you how a cat5e cable is way beyond anything you are ever going to need for one home surveillance camera.
The cabling from my NAS to my switch, I upgraded to Cat7a. This was easy as the devices are in the same room (good network design). This is cabling I will want to have bandwidth greater than gigabit on in the near future, this will happen when my internet connection goes past gigabit. It is currently at (600 Mbit/second).
My experience has been to install the cabling I deem required for my future needs. For 1 wire to a POE security camera, I believe gigabit will be plenty for the lifetime of my house, as such I installed cat5e within the last couple years. In other areas, I installed cat7a recently. I posted a picture in a post above where I illustrated where I would choose the different cables.
Not sure, where you got that idea. My earlier posts state:
The only thing I meant by these posts, was for the OP to consider the design of his home network and not just the cable. In my experience, a lot of headaches can be avoided by giving some thought to this.
I think we need to be careful when comparing latency and bandwith. Latency on a local network with no traffic will be zero or darn near it, weather it is 1mbps or 10gb. Now the amount of data you can send in that moment will be different ofcourse, but that isn't latency.
The key is as you pointed out is the sweet spot to spend reasonably and not break the bank and get the best bang for your buck. The wire is only a small part of that to as you have to have devices that support it as well.
Eventually it will be needed when we are streaming to holidecks in our houses and everything is raw video data for realism with all of our walls and ceilings being streaming displays. lol. Until then the practical use case for most homes is very little. The only times real benifit is seen is when moving large files in a house between devices that are able to fill the cable, Many modern devices can fill a 1Gbps cable in that condition, but if you are just transfering a movie from your laptop to your NAS can you not wait a few min. That is really the only time I see my network blip.
For any individual device, 5e is and will probably be fine in the "foreseeable" future. I've said, in a previous post, that the majority of one's endpoints will likely not exceed gigabit. However, it's unreasonable to think that you will have a cable drop for every device, that's not good network design.
When talking about running cables within your walls, through floors, attics, and such I believe those should be able to handle a reasonable amount of expansion. For instance, with Wifi-6 (or beyond), it's a pretty good bet that a family of 4 could exceed gigabit speed in the next 5-10 years. That's going to make the 5e cable running to that AP inadequate. If one decides that a shared office/study/etc needs another computer and you need to add a switch, wouldn't you want each computer to have a full gigabit connection back to your NAS (just in case you're both pulling down large files)?
For me, the harder it is to do something, like run cables, the more oversized it needs to be (within reason) to account for expansion.
My first home computer was the Comodore 64 computer with a 8 bit 1 megaHertz CPU and 64 kilobytes of RAM. I had a sequential access tape drive to store programs and data. When a floppy drive became available, I paid around $250 to get one.
My latest computer purchase included a 10 core CPU running at a turbo rate of 5.3 gigaHertz, 64 gigabytes of RAM, 1 NVME drive with 2 terabytes of storage and another SATA SSD with 2 terabytes of storage. A 2 TB SSD , whether SATA or NVME, is less expensive today than the Commodore floppy disk drive was years ago.
I still have in my home network some computers that are over 10 years old, but they have been upgraded several times over those years with additional memory, better graphics cards and solid state drives replacing mechanical drives, and older WiFi- N adapters being replaced with either AC or AX adapters. That is why I say that it is difficult to predict today what we will need ten years from now. Technology changes too rapidly.
When I first got married, I had a standard definition black and white TV. Now 4K flat screens are common and 8K screens with starting to gain popularity. Of course, in the case of 8K screens, our eyes are not capable of taking advantage of that resolution unless the screen is larger than most homes can accommodate.
Considering that CAT 6, 7, and 8 cables are only slightly more expensive than CAT 5e cables, using CAT 6 or CAT 7 cables for patch cables and using CAT 8 for long runs 100 ft and over makes a lot of sense. The longer the run, the more opportunity there is for picking up RF interference. Thus, the higher quality the cable, the less interference there will be.
CAT 8 might not be ideal for very short patch cables as it is going to be a lot stiffer. With short runs (2 meters and under), the loss in a CAT 6 cable won't be significant and the greater flexibility is a benefit.
I just needed a few cables so I paid for fixed-length pre-terminated cables. Nicely shielded/grounded. Sounds like I made a good choice. I see the challenge.
It may be a bit goofy to terminate but when done correctly I find that those connectors are more robust when used with the connector that locks up around the shielding. I have one I keep in my bag for connecting my laptop on the go and it has been fantastic. https://amzn.to/3xNWSMM
