 |
|
|
| The T568-A standard published by the Electronic Industry Association and Telecommunications Industry Association defines a system for building a data and voice communications network in an office environment that will have a lifespan of at least ten years and support networking products made by multiple vendors. This standard also defines the categories used to grade UTP cable. These categories have become the industry standard for UTP cable performance and are widely used by many manufacturers. |
|
|
|
|
| Category 3 cable supports transmissions of up to 16 MHz, and is primarily intended for use on voice telephone networks. However, this grade of cable also supports 10BaseT Ethernet and 4 Mbps Token Ring networks, as well as some newer protocols designed specifically for use on legacy cable installations, such 100BaseT4 Fast Ethernet and 100VG-AnyLAN. Category 3 cable is virtually never used for data network installations today. |
|
|
|
|
| The current industry standard, Category 5 UTP supports transmissions at up to 100 MHz, making it suitable for 100BaseTX Fast Ethernet, 16 Mbps Token Ring, OC-3 ATM, and Copper Distributed Data Interface (CDDI). Most of the prefabricated Ethernet cables on the market are Category 5. |
|
|
|
|
| The EIA/TIA standard goes no higher than Category 5, but there are new technologies emerging that increase the speed of local area networking beyond 100 MHz, such as Gigabit Ethernet, running at 1,000 Mbps. To support these faster networks, UTP cables that exceed the Category 5 specification are now on the market, even though the performance levels for these cables have not yet been formalized by the EIA/TIA's rather slow standards ratification process. |
|
|
|
|
| Cables supporting transmissions of up to 200 MHz can handle throughput up to 1.2 Gbps (gigabits per second), and are currently being marketed as Category 5 Enhanced or Category 5e cables. These are sufficient for use with the new Gigabit Ethernet hardware on the market. |
|
|
|
|
| UTP cables with performance levels beyond Category 5E are measured using level ratings developed by a corporation called Anixter, Inc. Level 6 cables support transmissions up to 350 MHz and Level 7 up to 400 MHz. It has not yet been decided whether these standards will eventually be proposed as EIA/TIA Category 6 and Category 7. |
|
|
|
|
| For a typical home or small business Ethernet network, Category 5 cable is recommended, even if you're only planning on running 10BaseT for now. Installing Category 5 cable will enable you to run Fast Ethernet now or upgrade to it at a later time. Gigabit Ethernet is currently a high-end backbone technology. There are virtually no applications at this time that would benefit from running Gigabit Ethernet to the desktop, so there is really no need to install Category 5e cable or better. |
|
United States
(change country or region)