[nzlug] long wire: cat5 or phone?

[Andrew Errington]

On Fri, 25 May 2007 18:24, you wrote:
> Well... thanks people.
> $40 got me 10m "category 6" cable from Dick Smith. Now I have the
> computer out of the kitchen and back into the office. (Not so handy for
> making coffee but the wife is glad to see less of me.)
>
> I was thinking along the advised lines myself when it hit me that the
> last time I did anything like this it was power cables over 100s of
> kms... I knew nothing about ethernet standards. For all I knew, I need
> to buffer the signal every so many meters... though I couldn't see how
> this would be less than 10m, I've been wrong before.
>
> Of course, regular phone cable is cheaper.


You can run UTP (Cat 5e) cable up to 100m (between a network hub or switch 
and a PC ethernet card).   IIRC you can have 5 'hops' between two PCs on a 
LAN (1 hop is a link from PC to hub or hub to hub), but I don't know if 
that limit applies these days, and anyway your house will not have any 
dimension larger than 500m, or, most likely, more than one hub or switch.

Phone cable is cheaper, but inadequate for high-speed networking.  Having 
said that, the jury's still out on Cat 6, and Cat 5e IMHO is fine for all 
current networking requirements.

A