Cable Question and use

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Lipo

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#248440 26-Mar-2019 18:33

Looking at installing Fibre shortly at home and I am very limited with ethernet and Wifi. I am thinking about using my existing telephone cables and switching their use to ethernet.

A couple of photos showing the existing telephone cables

Question - Are the cables Cat5 or Cat5e. If Cat5 will this be an issue

Your help would be appreciated

Thanks

cyril7

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#2205263 26-Mar-2019 19:40

Hi looking at it, you've got cat5e, but even if it were only cat5 I would not worry as cat5 supports full Gig performance out to well over 60m in fact some the full 100m length, to have a run over 40m in a residential situation is rare.

Regardless I can clearly see 5e on those cables.

Your next question is, are the cables run as full home run to a central point or are the daisy chained as phone ser ices typically are, this later layout would be an issue for data service.

Cyril

richms

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#2205271 26-Mar-2019 20:00

I know of someone getting 10 gig over the cat5 in their house no worries, the specs are for a worst case install with a lot of crosstalk from other cables in the bundle like in an office or server room. So you will probably be fine with that so long as its not going thru one of those piece of crap home hub style patch panels which look so bad I dont think they would even be cat3 at best.

Richard rich.ms

Lipo

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#2205305 26-Mar-2019 20:34

Thanks for you input

Cables all go back to a central point

webwat

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#2207798 30-Mar-2019 19:37

The Cat5e marking on the cable would be a clue...

Does that cabinet have a separate cable for each phone outlet in the house? Many don't because they don't have to be installed by anyone who knows what they are doing in NZ, and residential builders is unlikely to care unless their customer is specifying it. If you can see the end of the cable then you can connect all of them to an RJ45 patch panel and use short patch cables to connect each socket to your Ethernet switch (which should also be in the same cabinet).

Time to find a new industry!