As I’ve mentioned in another thread, I’m in the process of (re)building a house together with my wife and when doing the power cabling we also left outlets for network cables.
While we still need to do the upper floor the ground floor is almost finished and I would like to do some network cabling and I’m currently not sure how I should proceed.
I have seen the Level1 video where @wendell recommends Cat6a, but I’m considering just going with Cat8 in order to have high internal network speeds. I assumed Cat8 was backwards compatible with Cat6 (contrary to Cat7), but a quick Google search said the opposite so I’m unsure.
Furthermore, I was not able to find many Cat8 wall socket outlets, while there is an abundance of Cat6 socket outlets. However, if Cat8 is not backwards compatible I would need adapters, wouldn’t I?
So, do you have any tips or experience regarding house cabling? I would like to have the fastest speeds possible, without spending a fortune of course and Cat8's 25-40Gbps seem better than Cat6a's 10Gbps.
I would go with Cat6a for everything, and additional fiber runs (or conduits that will allow you to run fiber later) for any place where you could possibly think you will need > 10Gbps in 10 years or so … unless you already have a requirement now for 25Gbps on the clients side …
25-40-50-100 Gbps is already running into physics limits.
There’s this thing called Shannon–Hartley theorem which says you need to have really high signal-to-noise rate to pass a lot of data through a cable.
So, to increase throughput you end up increasing signal strength and power (and heat and energy use), or you end up shortening the distance, or you end up thickening the cables and adding shielding.
Fiber is a lot easier for higher bitrates, the only interference comes from fiber itself and from electrical / physical properties of the transceivers at the end. e.g. at 10Gbps it’s already more power efficient. This is the reason why they’re using it for 400Gbps Ethernet in datacenters.
So, if you want to future proof, put pvc or hdpe conduits allowing you to swap cables later.
I don’t know if fiber will become common for residential in 10 years, one can only hope.
This is the best advice. It’s pretty easy to run one inch conduit in walls and is so future proof. If you have a 2 story house with an attic and a basement or crawlspace just do conduit to the attic or crawlspace depending on first or 2nd floor then pick an area you can run a 4 inch or multiple 4 inch conduits from the attic to the basement.
I put mine right next to a plumbing chase and it’s been great for a mix of fiber and 6a wiring.
Plus also I ran some extra alarm wire after the fact. So having quasi accessible conduit is better than anything.
Plus the guys that built my house in 1920 put in conduit to all the electric light fixtures which has absolutely saved my bacon updating for modern wiring standards. Didn’t have to open up nearly as many walls or ceilings
So no Cat8 then. I wanted to have a fire and forget solution with an absurdly high bitrate without the hassle involved with fibre adapters and things like that. I did some research and it seems both Cat7 and Cat8 would be RJ45 compatible, but for a network outlet I would need the right keystones given that these cables are thicker than the Cat6a ones. (As @risk suggested^^)
Anyway, the cable conduits have already been laid and its a bit too late for me to have an extra conduit for fibre.
Yeah, it a two story house that has been built in 1950. So we could throw almost everything out and have everything done in a proper manner, which is why I also have conduits for network cables.
My current plan is to have most of my IT stuff (ISP router, switch, NAS, firewall (?)) in the basement, while my PC and WiFi access points are in the living areas. Thus, all of the conduits I currently have end up in my basement.
Anyway, I probably won’t need alarm wires since in the place I’m moving to, the people their don’t even lock their cars and many even leave their keys inside the car
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A few additional general questions:
You buys strongly recommended Cat6a over Cat8 but does this hold for Cat7 as well?
Is the reason for not recommending Cat8 that it is not sensible or would I be also asking for trouble? (Or is it also because hardware like sockets are more readily available for Cat6a)
Cat6a is already a PITA to work with, relative to cat6 or cat5e.
It took about 20 years for people to start seriously thinking about upgrading from 1Gbps to anything faster in their homes.
10Gbps still runs over cat6 up to 55m, which is shorter than most runs in people’s homes, so some amount of background compatibility of faster than 10Gbps with Cat6a is to be expected. (IIRC 10Gbps was 35m over cat5e, but I can’t find the reference now).
Isn’t “cat7” a fake label used by companies to entice buyers with a bigger number and not a real specification by whoever the hell makes the catX specifications?
I’ve had the same question some time ago and went with CAT6A because of the following reasons:
10GBASE-T over 100m is more then I will need on most of the runs through my 150 year old house.
(RJ45-) Patch panels and outlets are only available up to CAT6A anyways so why bother with cat7 on the wiring.
If ever fibre would be the much better idea
CAT 7 is overly expensive seen that RJ45 shouldn’t be capable of anything more than 500MHz and more is needed for more then 10GBase-T
and if there comes something the next years that works out more then 10 Gbit/s over RJ45 then for shorter runs it seems to me CAT6a will most likely be still ok.
As we are going to get FTTH sometime this year (1G downlink / 500M up) I think it will be enough for some years to come. The idea of putting some conduit in the walls to make it easier to replace with fibre in the future is maybe more important (from my pov)
Ah and the thing about CAT7 - it really seems to be CAT6 with better shielding but never specified / recognized by the EIA/TIA (ISO/IEC 11801)
