I’m thinking of wiring my whole house with cat6a cable with the idea of making it a 10gigabit network.
I’m having some difficulty on settling on a good manufacturer/vendor for the supplies though. Most people who are doing consumer level reviews on Amazon are normal people who only have a gigabit network .
I was originally looking at Monoprice and I also looked at Startech but I don’t want to go with the wrong vendor and have to redo it all as I don’t have the capability to test the cable bandwidth throughput at this time.
Unless you have a particularly large house, I’d recommend you don’t do your own cat6a, and use a reputable cat6 instead.
cat6 is so much easier to work with (e.g. terminate correctly) not to mention cheaper, and 10Gbase-T ethernet is spec’d to run at up to 55m distance over cat6 which usually plenty for a typical house setup.
Chances are, if you have a need for 10Gbps at multiple points on the premises, you’ll probably want to use a few fibers for a QSFP+ 40Gig backbone anyway, and won’t need a long 10Gig copper run.
I plan on paying the extra (hopefully reasonable) cost to wire the house once.
My though is…if cat6 is capable of punching above it’s weight class to 10gigabit over 55meters…what will cat6a be capable of in the future? 100gigabit over 40meters? Pure speculation but I plan on wiring the house one time and never touching it again so I want to use the best (reasonably priced) stuff I can when I do it.
Probably won’t see anything faster than 10Gbps over cat6a copper at least until 2030.
10Gbps runs over cat5e as well, up to 45m as per the standards.
These days there’s newish 2.5Gbps and 5Gbps standards as well.
There’s also transceivers that are “out of spec” but can do e.g. 1Gbps over 200m of cat5e, or 5Gbps over 100m of cat5e.
In general there’s nothing wrong with monoprice. It’s all copper waste exported to China, being recycled into cables and sold back. You can print whatever brand you want on the cable jacket.
Edit: did some digging actually there is a 40Gbase-T standard today, 30m over cat.8 cable, it’s 802.3bq… seems like yes, anything faster than 10Gbps basically needs either single mode or multimode fiber, or just a twinax dac cable for a copper interconnects between devices without lasers or LEDs…
If you want to future proof, make sure your copper cables are easy to swap out.
I might run some premade fiberoptic cables to the outbuildings on my property someday in the future (2+ years) but there’s no need to do that now.
STP looks so darn cool though.
How hard could it be?
Nah. Almost every room in this house had rj11 run to it before. It’s an older style home made back when a phone in every room was cool. I was thinking I would reuse those already made holes in my walls for cat6a.
Mainly you have to run a ground to your patch panels and keystones are expensive if you’re using any. Terminating is a little trickier and the cable is thicker/stiffer as well.
If you’ve never seen bulk cat6a before, it is already much thicker/stiffer than cat6. It’s not like store-bought cat6a cables which feel about the same as everything else. A bundle of it is pretty unwieldy and shielding just adds to it.