Can you extend a Cat 5 network with Cat 6 and will the speed in the Cat 6 section be affected by the Cat 5?
My parents are renovating an old house. They have built a new extension and the electrician has wired that first. The problem is that he has installed Cat 5 cabling there. He says it’s a lot of work now to change it to Cat 6. He is about to install the network in the rest of the house (part of same network) but I am wondering if he can use Cat 6 there as we will have almost all of our devices there (PCs, NAS, Media servers). I would like to have Cat 6 for streaming HD content and for fast reliable file transfer. So as far as I can see there are three options:
(a) Forget about Cat 6 and use Cat 5 cabling all over the house (not great for HD content/file transfer) but I know it will work properly
(b) Have Cat 5 in the extension and Cat 6 in the rest of the house (connected on the same network). I am wondering if there would be a compatability problem with this setup. (i.e. Could the Cat 5 section bring down the entire network to 100Mbps? For example, if two devices are connected in the Cat 6 section can they still make use of the 1000Mbps speed? – I know that if one device is in the Cat 6 section and the other is in the Cat 5 you will only get 100Mbps between them – I wouldn’t mind that a long as I had 1000Mbps between NAS and media server in the Cat 6 section.
(c) The third option is to just forget about the Cat 5 section in the extension (i.e. leave it redundant ,it’s not a big area – Kitchen, dining room, bedroom upstairs) and install the Cat 6 cabling in the rest of the house (large area). If we need to extend the network to the extension we can use wireless. In this setup the Cat 6 network would not have any connection to the redundant Cat 5 network.
So really, my question is: Which option should we go for?
You might think “Get the electrician to take out the Cat 5 and install Cat 6 but my parents aren’t too worried about it and the guy is old so I don’t want to ask him to do that. :@
Thanks in advance!
cmos1981
Tagged with: Bedroom Upstairs • Entire Network • Parents
Filed under: Computer Networking
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sussex electrical
Go with the Cat 5 all through the house. Cat 5 works fine at gigabit speed and there’s a good chance your Cat 5 is actually Cat 5e if it’s a fairly new install. The wireless isn’t there yet at the speeds you are talking about, but will be in a couple of years. The difference between Cat 5 and Cat 6 isn’t that great. No compatabilty problems and definately no problems running Gigabit. Of greater concern is probably the distance the wiring is running. What’s the longest wire run you are looking at? Is it over 100 meters?
brighton electrics
We never practically use the full bandwidth of CAT6 .
Given your situation and cost to performance ratio, i would suggest CAT 5e.
You might select CAT6 as the wiring for the backbone if you want.
brighton electrics
as Debajyoti Banerjee said you must probably have cat 5e cable which is enough for gigbit ethernet, but make sure you have gigbit switch too ! other wise you will get 100Mbps all the time regardless what category of cable you are using