I was curious, how many of you use CAT 6? We use Cat 5e for everything.
I've always understood that thanks to rising copper prices and limits to current technology, CAT 6 is not real practical, but I have done jobs where someone else has used CAT 6.
How widespread is it? Should we change how we do things?
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We only run CAT6 if the customer demands it, otherwise it's pretty much all CAT5e. We have only had one large job that required dual CAT6 runs and it was major overkill in my opinion.
We have done a few jobs with cat6 but only because they were spec'ed that way by the customers IT department. We have not and probably will not propose cat6 for a job. I think that it is overkill at the present time. As a bit of information for everyone. we just finished a 200+ drop job using the new cat6A cable from Avaya and we found it is a real pain to work with. It is larger in diameter and much stiffer therefore harder to work with when it comes to termination. At test there were many opens that had to be repaired costing much lost time. I don't think the hardware is quite ready for prime time. Another problem we had was when we went to certify it we discovered our test gear was not able to test it and a new machine would have to be bought or rented. I can't justify that kind of expenditure at this time so will have to rent. I don't forsee taking on any more of these kinds of jobs any time soon.
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I've done a little work with 6A. It's a stiff cable for sure, but I found that it is more resilient to kinking than 5E or 6E cable. That is probably due to the thicker outer jacket.
Isn't CAT6 more for server to server type use? Why would you need something rated that high for server to terminal? I'm not an IT guy so this may sound like a dumb question to you computer guru's, but just something I've wondered about.
If you are going to be running up to 1Gigabit, you can run either Cat5e or Cat6. The Cat6 has better performance characteristics, so there is a smaller chance of crosstalk or EMI causing problems. In most cases however, you aren't going to see any difference in network performance with one cable over the other. That's the problem with Cat6...you really aren't getting much more for your money. You can run 10Gig over about 35meters of Cat6, but only if you take certain measures like taking apart your cable bundles.
Cat6 isn't superior enough to Cat5e to make it worthwhile in my opinion. I think you'll see most people jump from 5e right to 6a, and 6 will just go away at some point.
I'll agree with the consensus here... to a point. Keep in mind that C6 has over twice the bandwidth of C5e. That's a pretty sizeable difference in performance.
Like all products, it has it's place. If the customer is in a field where high data transfer rates are needed then they will benefit from C6 (medical imaging, architectural design/CADD, etc.). These are the fields most likely to deploy 10GbE in the future.
If the customer plans on being in their building for a long while 10+ years then I would recommend installing C6 in order to futureproof them (to a point) against technological advances. They may not need it now, but what is the likelihood that they will in 5 years?
The premium to install C6 over C5e is roughly around 25-30%. It's a lot less expensive that recabling in 5-7 years (too often the norm).
I use a bit of CAT6. In the homes we wire, we use a structured cable that has two lines of RG6 and two CAT6.
In commercial buildings, I drop CAT6 for all new data lines and CAT5e for voice. We buy our CAT6 straight from the factory, so the cost diff. between the two is pretty small.
