Cabling: Does Cat6 network cable make a real difference over Cat5e

August 25, 2017 wortex cables 0

Is there any noticeable difference for home or office usage? The short answer is no. Choosing patch cords category 6 over Cat5e don’t affect your network performance. So if Cat6 cables cost 30% more, why not saving and buying standard cat5e or even cat5 network cables. For most users Cat 5e would be perfectly fine; however, there are certain situations when Cat6 must be used.  First of all, if you need to transfer 10Gbit/s under 55m you might want to choose cat 6 cables because cat 5-e doesn’t support 10gbit. Cat 6a patch cord is capable of transferring 10Gbit/s at full cable length (100m)  and it’s having a better protection over interference and the theoretical maximum speed is much faster.

Network Interference

Cat 6/6a cables are advertised to have better network interference protection; however, for most usage scenarios it’s overkill to use expensive cables.

Interference is something that modifies or affect your signal quality as it travels along the network cable. If two cables are close to each other, a crosstalk interference might happen. This could be only noticeable in big data centers where there are plenty of cables near each other. In this case, using expensive cables (STP) Shielded Cables instead of (UTP) Unshielded Cables might provide a better connection.

Cat 5e and Cat 6 cables

Cat6 vs Cat5e latency

For testing the latency over different cables,  a very accurate program with advanced functionality was used. Link to Download Hrping program.  Also, we used a Cisco router and an intel network card to avoid any possible issues due to hardware.

Cat 6 cable ping results:

Cat 5e cable ping results:

As you can see the cat 5e cable was even a little bit faster. A different test has been made with 65000 bytes instead of 60, with the same results. Other cables were placed near the testing cables to simulate interference. And such wasn’t found. In many tests, the cat5e cable was slightly better.

If you really need 10Gbit/s your option is Cat6, or Cat6a if you have cable more than 55m length. Otherwise, cat5e will be more than sufficient for any use.