Cat 6a Ethernet

[ketinkrad]

Is Cat 6a Ethernet cable the best on the market now or is there something better? Thank you Ketinkrad

[MadHatter]

Is Cat 6a Ethernet cable the best on the market now or is there something better? Thank you Ketinkrad

Depends on the money. If you don't have the bucks to shell out for a fiber optic setup in the house then Cat 6 is good. Much better then the Cat5/5e that's pretty much the standard today. Just make sure your router/switch is capable of handling Gigabit. Cat 6 will be/has been replacing Cat 5e now for a few years.

[gyrene81]

Cat 6 is Gigabit standard but...your ISP is only going to be 20 Megabits max...in home between systems with a Gb switch and Cat5e or Cat6 cables you will have really fast connections...on the web, your connection is going to remain the same as it has been.

[68Wooley]

Also remember most domestic routers and switches will work at the lowest common denominator speed, so if you plug in 3 machines capable of gigabit ethernet and one 10Mb/sec legacy machine, everyone's running at 10Mb/sec.

[Vulcan]

Also remember most domestic routers and switches will work at the lowest common denominator speed, so if you plug in 3 machines capable of gigabit ethernet and one 10Mb/sec legacy machine, everyone's running at 10Mb/sec.

Errr no, dunno where you heard that one?

That used to happen for hubs, about 10 years ago, and even then you typically had switching hubs where the 10mbps and 100mbps networks were different segments.

And gyrene81... maybe 20mbps is the top speed in hicksville, but the rest of the world has moved on. Though I dunno what your point is in regards the the original question.

ketinkrad yes Cat 6a is where you want to be.

[gyrene81]

And gyrene81... maybe 20mbps is the top speed in hicksville, but the rest of the world has moved on. Though I dunno what your point is in regards the the original question.

Really Vulcan? You sure about that?

ATT DSL:

AT&T Elite has all the features you need including:

    * Downstream Speed: Up to 6.0 Mbps
    * Upstream Speed: Up to 768 Kbps
http://www.attoffer.com/13/internet.html

ATT Uverse:

AT&T U-verse High Speed Internet Max Plus
Top-of-the-line High Speed entertainment for just an additional $65 more per month with a TV package.

    * Download files and web pages with downstream speeds up to 18 Mbps
http://www.attoffer.com/13/u-verse_build.html

Charter:

High Speed Internet Max
Download Speed Up to 20 Mbps
http://www.charter.com/Visitors/Products.aspx?MenuItem=37

Comcast:

Need More Speed?

Downloads up to 16 Mbps with PowerBoost. Perfect for families!
http://www.comcast.com/Corporate/Learn/HighSpeedInternet/highspeedinternet.html

Road Runner:

Upgrade to Turbo!

Get up to 15 Mbps with Powerboost™ for only $10 more per month
http://www.roadrunneroffers.com/

You must know something the ISP's in the U.S. don't know...

[1701E]

You forgot FIOS.  I know my Brother has it in DC and when I visited I did a Speed-Test and it rated it at around 50Mbps.  According to Verizon's site "Fiber optics all the way to your home brings download speeds up to 50 Mbps and the fastest upload speeds."
Course if you were talking about widely-available Internet then, yea, FIOS would be out.

[gyrene81]

You forgot FIOS.  I know my Brother has it in DC and when I visited I did a Speed-Test and it rated it at around 50Mbps.  According to Verizon's site "Fiber optics all the way to your home brings download speeds up to 50 Mbps and the fastest upload speeds."
Course if you were talking about widely-available Internet then, yea, FIOS would be out.

Yeah, I considered it...limited availability and you have to have a verizon phone account...at $100/mo just for the internet connection, I'd have to be making money with it. I just considered the highest availability ISP's.

[Tigger29]

maybe 20mbps is the top speed in hicksville, but the rest of the world has moved on

Well here in the St. Louis metro area (not exactly cutting edge, but far from 'hicksville') we can get 20Mbps through Charter.  I think AT&T's U-Verse offers 30Mbps... but no FIOS available yet... even so... 1024Mbps = 1Gbps (Gigabit) so even if you found an ISP offering five times the speed I can currently get through Charter... it's still only 10% of the home network speed...

Personally, I feel that 90% of the time internet speeds are nothing more than marketing hype.  For gaming, low (or at least consistent) latency (lag) is much more important than actual download speeds, and my Netflix-On-Demand playing a HD movie doesn't even come close to touching my current speed of 5Mbps... so unless you have a family where several families are downloading HD movies at the same time... anything past this IMHO is overkill.

Unless you do a lot of transfers from one computer to another on a home network (or maybe even have your own file or media server set up), there will be no difference between a 100Mbps and a 1Gbps network connection.

I will say this though... They screwed up and accidentally gave my modem a cap of 20Mbps for a short while a week or so ago, and while it was nice having some downloads go extremely fast, at most it only saved me a few seconds here and there, and since many web-servers won't even upload at those speeds, many connections had no difference at all.

[Vulcan]

Really Vulcan? You sure about that?

Yeah actually I am. We're just starting a bunch of fibre rollouts, gigabit to the home, in some of our medium-smaller towns. In NZ. The deployment costs around US$500 per home. ADSL2+ goes to 24Mbps, VDSL2+ to 100Mbps. We've had VDSL2+ deployments here for a while now offering 30Mbps sync speeds. Plus there's other technologies kicking around.

Are you telling me the might USA is being left behind technology wise by little old NZ? Somehow I doubt it.

So, yes, I'm sure.

[Fulmar]

Yeah actually I am. We're just starting a bunch of fibre rollouts, gigabit to the home, in some of our medium-smaller towns. In NZ. The deployment costs around US$500 per home. ADSL2+ goes to 24Mbps, VDSL2+ to 100Mbps. We've had VDSL2+ deployments here for a while now offering 30Mbps sync speeds. Plus there's other technologies kicking around.

Are you telling me the might USA is being left behind technology wise by little old NZ? Somehow I doubt it.

So, yes, I'm sure.

America's broadband infrastructure is far behind Asia and Europe (and apparently NZ).  Pipelines are oversold and overfilled with traffic.  The largest US cities have better infrastructures, but America is a fairly large country and a relatively spread out population in suburbs.  The surrounding metro population where I live in Wisconsin is ~500,000.  Fastest internet I can get is 15Mbps.

Just ask Skuzzy.

[ketinkrad]

The City where I live, Comcast gives me 50 MBPS. Ketinkrad

[gyrene81]

The City where I live, Comcast gives me 50 MBPS. Ketinkrad

Where do you live? The best I could find advertised was that 16Mbps with "powerboost"... 

[MadHatter]

Are you telling me the might USA is being left behind technology wise by little old NZ? Somehow I doubt it.

Yea, actually. Aside from the fluctuations in population density, USA's infrastructure is ruled by the ISPs. Think of it like the oil producing countries. They got it, you want it, and they can charge an arm and a leg for it. My house is a good example. I pay 45$ a month for the possibility of getting 15 megs down. Problem is I live on a street where there are 5 apartment complexes, each ranging 50-250 units. I'm lucky if I get 1.2 megs down. Average speed for a DL here is 900 kilobits a second. All these apartments are sharing the same pipe. Funny thing is I tried to downgrade our service to 3 megs down (I'm not getting nowhere close to what I'm paying for, why pay for it?), and Time Warner told me it would be more expensive.   Apparently when we got our service, we got a "special deal" where we got the 15 meg service for the 3 meg price a year ago. They told me with the price hikes congress put in place (words from their mouth) it would be 57$ a month for 3 meg service now. A QOS agreement would cost me anywhere from 200$ for 3 megs up to 2000$ per month. I'm not happy with these people but I don't have a choice. It's either AT&T, Time Warner, or Grande communications. AT&T can't provide service because the apartments are to old (wiring couldn't handle it), and Grande doesn't provide service to my apartments (the apartments won't let them in, they have a deal with TW). Another further out is GVTC. A buddy of mine is running satellite internet because of them. When he went to buy a house (cookie cutter home) he had called them to see what service was out there. They told him his home had Fiber Optic all the way throughout the house. They kept stressing he had fiber optic, the fastest on the market, he got suspicious and called me out to look at it. There was FO all over the place, in the house. Once it hit demarcation, it switched to Cat5e. Bottom line, our Internet is ruled by the bottom line. The providers are in no rush to improve anything, so we're stuck.

Ketinkrad, where do you live? I wanna move there.

[Vulcan]

They kept stressing he had fiber optic, the fastest on the market, he got suspicious and called me out to look at it. There was FO all over the place, in the house. Once it hit demarcation, it switched to Cat5e. Bottom line, our Internet is ruled by the bottom line. The providers are in no rush to improve anything, so we're stuck.

Not sure what your point is, cat5e is still capable of 1Gbps speed. You'd need to identify the CPE device and what sort of optics are being provisioned (ie SX, LX, BX, is it epon etc).