sundance-communications.com/forum Forums Wiring - Telecom Carriers - Trunks & Services Cabling Telephones Systems Wiring Cat 5 vs Cat 5e

When you talk about certifying cables and mention gigabit, you are really talking about two different things.

Certification testing will test the cable for compliance with industry standards for the cable itself. You don't certify you cable for gigabit, you certify as Cat5e, Cat6, etc.

If you want to verify whether the cabling will work with a specific network technology, ie. 1000Base-T, you perform a qualification test.

With your specific situation I would explain that Cat5 is not rated for gigabit, but you may be able to qualify it as running gigabit if the distances are short enough. I doubt that you could certify Cat5 cabling with any modern certification meter. It won't have the frequency response necessary to pass as Cat5e, and the certification meter won't have a setting to test as plain old Cat5.

Moral of the story - replace the Cat 5 with 5e or 6.

Although Windows seems to hide this sort of information from the user (it does not give you collision or CRC failure statistics--it does give you an "Errors" statistic if you run netstat -e), other operating systems (such as Linux) and managed Ethernet switches do not. The information is there if you want to look at it and determine if your network is healthy.


I am running gigabit on Commscope (not no-name) Cat5, have been for about 3 years now, and I have not had any issues with bad packets or retransmissions.