I've found that Cat6 is not very much more expensive than Cat5e, so go ahead and install it. The connectors may be another subject though, so consider going Cat5e rated connectors and upgrade them later if need be. The real cost would be were you have to rewire, so putting the 250Mhz rated stuff into the walls now, at a minimal price premium, seems like the right plan even though it's hard to imagine needing the bandwidth within the lifetime of the solution. rw2 Rich Wellner <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > This is pretty dependent on price and application, but I'll make a few > guesses. You are talking about an office, so that implies that you > are running standard networking stuff. This is generally low volume > file sharing applications. Even a very high volume database will > generally get disk or cpu bound long before it is swamped by a fast or > even standard Ethernet connection. Plus for those few critical > machines it is much more cost effective to provide a fast solution > (e.g. gigabit Ethernet or fiber) to a switch then a slower solution to > the rest of the network than to run fiber to every node. > > I don't have pricing on Cat6, but if it's only a few dollars more > (like 5e is compared to 5) then you may as well get it. I suspect, > because my suppliers don't yet stock cat6, that it is much more > expensive though. If this is the case it's harder to justify. > > Cat5e or Enhanced Cat5 will run gigabit Ethernet (and with the $95 > chips coming out from National Semi soon you may be running this > sooner than you think) and that is *a lot* of data. It's hard to > imagine a need for more within the lifetime of your cabling solution. > To put it in perspective a hard drive can pull data off it's platters > at a sustainable rate of 10-15MBs. Gigabit Ethernet can pump data at > several times that rate (I'm seeing 35MBs on our slowest TCP/IP stacks > and 60MBs on better ones, the point being that the machines can't keep > up with the network!). > > The promise of Cat6 is something like 250Mhz usable bandwidth compared > with 100Mhz for Cat5. The problems are that Cat6 isn't standardized > yet (though that isn't a huge concern as the standards are close and a > wiring solution that you buy today could be tested to verify that it > exceeds the proposed standards) and it requires field testing. In the > first case there is some risk of installing a solution that doesn't > work with the standards and in the second it would take longer to test > and therefore cost more to install (perhaps why 'the vendor' is > recommending it?). > > Gigabit Ethernet is a lot of bandwidth so unless Cat6 is quite > comparable in cost from your vendor I would definitely skip it in > favor of a Cat5e solution. > > It might be fun to ask 'the vendor' what new technologies will require > more than 100MBs of bandwidth and see what they say. I mean, really, > how many HDTV 1080i signals do you actually need to concurrently > broadcast to each node on the network! :-) > > rw2 > > Jim Jarosz <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > > > Perhaps this is a bit off topic, but... > > > > We are putting an addition on our office and the > > conduit is being placed in the framing. The 'building > > committee' is defering the networking wires. One of > > our vendors says to put the wires in and use category > > six cable since that will OK for "any of the new > > technologies that are coming.' > > > > Does that sound like it's correct? I would appreciate > > some comments. > > -- > "Debugging is at least twice as hard as programming. If your code is > as clever as you can possibly make it, then by definition you're not > smart enough to debug it." > -- Brian Kernighan -- "Debugging is at least twice as hard as programming. If your code is as clever as you can possibly make it, then by definition you're not smart enough to debug it." -- Brian Kernighan - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-newbie" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] Please read the FAQ at http://www.linux-learn.org/faqs
