sundance-communications.com/forum Forums Wiring - Telecom Carriers - Trunks & Services Cabling Telephones Systems Wiring 400+' cable pull

Ditto with all the above advise.
You are going to be over the limit and I would never do this for a customer, but on a side note I have a Cat 5e run at my house that goes from the house to my garage that is 450ft that works like a charm and has for the last 4 or 5 years with no problems at all.

If it was for just you ---you could take a chance and run the 5e---but for a customer, you should just go with the fiber & media converters and be done with it. You'll be happy, and he'll be happy. Otherwise, you might be fighting that cable run for months---and then end up running fiber anyway.

We order pre-made fiber from a places like Clifford of Vermont. You can get media converters from them, but they have been a bit pricey in the past. But check around. You can purchase media converters at a lot of different places.

As others have said, if it is for a customer, you should stick to the specs. But, just in case anyone should ever want to know-

What is actually connected with twisted pair ethernet can be key as to whether distance limitations can be stretched. As you would expect, the first, and most significant, is the actual speed: 10baseT is more forgiving than 100baseT is more forgiving than 1000baseT. Yes, almost all equipment will attempt to auto-neg to a lower speed if it cant link at the design bitrate, but in my experience dedicated 10 mbps switches and cards are more robust at their design speed than similiar 100 mbps equipment locking in at 10. This is probably because of the physical design of the line drivers, which is radically different for each of the aforementioned generations of base-T ethernet. I'll spare you the details...

There are other factors as well: A single computer at the end of a long run will invariably be more forgiving than a hub with multiple NICs attatched, but by the same token a good quality switch placed at the endpoint in front of a single computer may achieve a link when the computer's NIC couldn't - it all comes down to differing quality levels of equipment. Some 10baseT gear (now considered obsolete) could easily push way, way beyond the 300 foot limit. So IF people can live with a slower speed and don't mind used equipment with no warranty, using older, slower equipment can mean the difference between being able to use existing copper infrastructure or not. Times are hard, after all. And sometimes that old junk can surprise you with what it can do.

People now laugh at 10baseT as being ridiculously slow, but 10 megabits per second is still way faster than most people's internet connections. And it has an ace up its sleeve: 10base2 (que gut-busting laughter). No, I'm not joking. 10base2 is still used in the CO environment all the time, mainly because of the ability to daisy-chain. But guess what the 2 stands for: 200 meters! That's right, the lowly old "thin coax" of yore had a design distance rating of over 600 feet! I think the distance limitation for 10GbaseT (10 gigabit/sec, the latest, greatest attempt to deny the limitations of copper) is about 180 feet over cat 6 cable, and that drops to about 150 feet for cat 5e.

Jim
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