After seeing that my wireless speeds were much faster than the speeds I was getting over Ethernet, I decided to invest in some new cables. I didn’t know it before, but I saw while I was changing them out that my current cables were Cat 5e. While putting my network together, I had just been grabbing whatever cables I could find in my scrap drawers. Now I have Cat 8 cables and my speeds jumped from 7MB/s to an average of over 40MB/s. It’s a much bigger improvement than I expected, especially for such a small investment.
Cat8 is pointless with gigabit equipment as far as speed goes. Cat6 will do 10gig, you just had bad cables.
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100m is the spec max. More than that, you need a powered repeater (i.e. baby switch). And you won’t get 100m if you have bad cables.
I once saw a run in a cruise terminal, out of the cruise ship, down the gangway, along the terminal hallway, and through two more little switches just sitting on the floor next to an outlet. Not sure why they needed that run, but that’s what they did and it worked.
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Yes, I was agreeing with you. Although as I mentioned, it’s technically 100m, which is 328 feet and one inch. And the spec also allows up to 5m of patch cable on each end, which I don’t think I knew.
But that’s the spec target. Low-quality cable, physical damage, or environmental conditions like interference may reduce the actual max in practice. You might be able to push it with cat6 and up, but the spec still only says 100m.
Copper core versus copper clad aluminum is going to matter here too. Both will claim to hit the spec, but you’re more likely to get there with the expensive copper only.
Yeah and don’t forget good terminations. I’ve seen a lot of people not getting the speeds they could get just because they used cheap plugs/connectors.