When will CAT5e become obsolete?

[halfpower]

Any guesses? Any educated guesses? Gigabit networks are a new thing, right?

 

[spidey07]

It already is to an extent. Most new installations are cat6.

 

[dphantom]

Anyone specing new cable should be going CAT VI. But I have miles of old CAT V in my buildings still and retrofitting is not an option.

 

[JackMDS]

Obsolete is defined in the dictionary as No longer in use.

So, from the point of view of an installer it is already obsolete.

From a point of view of the users, there is No rush, it will take 3-5 years before it becomes obsolete.

:sun:

 

[spidey07]

I forgot the going rates but I believe it is some like 80-90% of all current installations are cat6.

But cat5/5e will still be around for a long time, 5+ years, because there is not really a compelling reason to upgrade. For all but the most demanding applications 100 Base-T is fine.

 

[Mark R]

Is the lower bandwidth response of Cat6 (100 MHz) compared to Cat5e (350 MHz) of any relevance?

Anyway, if i were doing a new installation - it'd be Cat6 rather than cat5.

 

[cmetz]

halfpower, I believe that the amount of cat5/5e installed base is so huge that there's a lot of incentive to find ways to use it.

Cat5e definitely can do a gigabit via 1000BaseT if installed right, and gigabit to the desktop is enough bandwidth for a while. Very few sites really need more than 100Mb/s to the desktop, and most sites quite frankly could get by with 10Mb/s switched to the desktop if they needed to (in fact, surprisingly many sites force port speeds to 10Mb/s so they don't have to overengineer their backbones and servers to deal with a whole lot more load coming in).

There is an IEEE group researching 10 Gig over copper. So far, cat5e distances for 10 Gig aren't long enough to be interesting. But there's a lot of research and a lot of money being put into that problem. There's also a very real possibility of some intermediate speed, like a 4 Gig, over cat5e. Some intermediate step that would be able to sell gear but be more feasable. A lot of sites would take 4 Gig on their existing cable plant over 10 Gig on a building-wide rewire.

Mark R, cat5e's bandwidth requirement is 100MHz. cat6's bandwidth requirement is 250MHz. Many manufacturers created an "enhanced category 5" or "enhanced category 5e" cable with a "350MHz" bandwidth. Problem is, their "350MHz bandwidth" cables didn't meet the cat6 specifications. Often times, not even really delivering 250MHz of bandwidth, and definitely not delivering on other specs like NEXT/FEXT that are more realistically a problem than the raw bandwidth. Remember, "350MHz" is a marketing term. "cat5", "cat5e", and "cat6" are EIA standards with strict compliance rules.

 

[skyking]

I am doing a complete data and phone system for my employer's new office construction, and I cannot believe the number of contractors who ask "why use cat6, it is twice as expensive, blah blah yadda yadda..."
They want to bid the cable plant and drag in cat5E to a brand new installation. Like that was going to happen

 

[GeekDrew]

Originally posted by: skyking
I am doing a complete data and phone system for my employer's new office construction, and I cannot believe the number of contractors who ask "why use cat6, it is twice as expensive, blah blah yadda yadda..."
They want to bid the cable plant and drag in cat5E to a brand new installation. Like that was going to happen

My last employer just had one building remodelled, and use Cat5e in it... and they're building a new one with Cat5e. Of course, we're talking about public education here.

 

[dphantom]

Originally posted by: skyking
I am doing a complete data and phone system for my employer's new office construction, and I cannot believe the number of contractors who ask "why use cat6, it is twice as expensive, blah blah yadda yadda..."
They want to bid the cable plant and drag in cat5E to a brand new installation. Like that was going to happen

I did a new build out 5 years ago. Originally spec'ed 5e, but contractor asked if they could bid Cat6 too. I said sure. Cat 6 came in only slightly higher at that time so we went with Cat 6.

It is a heavier cable and takes more time to punch down, but double the cost is ridiculous.

 

[ktwebb]

Originally posted by: JackMDS
Obsolete is defined in the dictionary as No longer in use.

So, from the point of view of an installer it is already obsolete.

From a point of view of the users, there is No rush, it will take 3-5 years before it becomes obsolete.

:sun:

Up until about a year ago their was Cat3 in a couple of areas in one of our buildings. This from a company with 30K employees and the area it was in was an annex of a building that many of the higher ups had offices in. Cat5 or at least Cat5E will be installed (legacy installations I am talking about) and in use alot longer than 5 years down the road.

 

[dnoyeb]

CAT5 aint going anywhere. If people decide to pull it out and run cat6, it will only be for backbone runs, which are probably on fiber these days anyway. To the desktop I think CAT5 is the choiciest. 10mb is just not acceptable, too long to move those huge powerpoint presentations and picture and movie files around. Plus video conferencing.

For a new install i would use the cheapest >= CAT5.

 

[nweaver]

A full duplex 10 Mb is fast enough for most, and there are still alot of Fortune 500 companies that use 10 Mb quite a bit. A few years ago it was staggering the number of 10Mb only companies. Most are now replacing with upgraded 100/1000 for things like port security, and NAC features.

 

[skyking]

Originally posted by: dphantom

Originally posted by: skyking
I am doing a complete data and phone system for my employer's new office construction, and I cannot believe the number of contractors who ask "why use cat6, it is twice as expensive, blah blah yadda yadda..."
They want to bid the cable plant and drag in cat5E to a brand new installation. Like that was going to happen

I did a new build out 5 years ago. Originally spec'ed 5e, but contractor asked if they could bid Cat6 too. I said sure. Cat 6 came in only slightly higher at that time so we went with Cat 6.

It is a heavier cable and takes more time to punch down, but double the cost is ridiculous.

I will be happy to spend the extra time and minimal additional cost on this installation. I can certify it and walk away knowing the customer will have no complaints or problems for many years to come. It is an easy place to retrofit or add runs to, but I will pull extra cable into locations that I think may need it, and leave the in the wall as spares. I might burn an extra $100 in cable, but that is labor to pull only one run later through the suspended overhead.

 

[spidey07]

Originally posted by: nweaver
A full duplex 10 Mb is fast enough for most, and there are still alot of Fortune 500 companies that use 10 Mb quite a bit. A few years ago it was staggering the number of 10Mb only companies. Most are now replacing with upgraded 100/1000 for things like port security, and NAC features.

lotta places are still Broken Ring...

err, I mean Token Ring.

 

[nweaver]

Token is a blazing 16Mb/s!!

 

[spidey07]

Originally posted by: nweaver
Token is a blazing 16Mb/s!!

Hey man...that's how we built high performance networks back in the day...

Individual token rings per floor with a FDDI backbone.

With it large frame size and "everybody gets some bandwidth no matter what" mentality, token ring and FDDI was the shiznit.

 

[cmetz]

FDDI is the only network technology I've seen operationally that really, truly, and reliably passed the backhoe test. A big place I worked long ago had a dual ring FDDI backbone with proper geographic diversity. And a lot of lowest-bidder contractors around, always working on some building or other. We had a whole lot of cases where they struck the backbone, and nobody ever noticed so much as one packet lost because of it.

Ethernet can't do that. (well, yet, being worked on)

Don't knock the old fashioned stuff, there's a whole lot of excellent engineering that we threw in the dumpster because faster and cheaper beat it in the mass market

 

[dnoyeb]

Originally posted by: nweaver
A full duplex 10 Mb is fast enough for most, and there are still alot of Fortune 500 companies that use 10 Mb quite a bit. A few years ago it was staggering the number of 10Mb only companies. Most are now replacing with upgraded 100/1000 for things like port security, and NAC features.

Most where? I dont know any place of business where 10mb would be acceptable today. Old companies can be hard to changeover but you can bet they want to. try pushing the monthly windows patch on 10mb. I just cant see it.