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Old Cat5e / Cat6 Twisted Pair Copper Ethernet Cable Given Speed Boost

Thursday, Sep 29th, 2016 (8:23 am) - Score 2,493

Do you connect your broadband router to a computer via wires? If so then you’re probably using the old Category 5e / 6 Ethernet cable, which is limited to 1000Mbps (1000BASE-T / 1000BASE-TX). Not that you’ll need it, but the new IEEE 802.11bz standard can give those a multi-Gigabit speed boost.

Estimates suggest that some 70 billion meters of Cat 5e / 6 Ethernet cabling has been installed in homes, businesses and other sites around the world. This is a problem because WiFi networks have been getting a lot faster and moving into multi-Gigabit territory, although admittedly most home networks often can’t take advantage of such speeds due to real-world limitations.

Never the less it’s inevitable that wired Local Area Networks (LAN) will eventually need to support something faster than Gigabit Ethernet, ideally without replacing masses of existing Cat5e / 6 cabling with the more modern Cat6a (10,000Mbps) or Cat 8 (25-50,000Mbps) standards.

The solution is an intermediary called 802.11bz (802.11bz-2016), which is based on the existing 10GBASE-T (10Gbps) standard but at a lower signalling rate. As a result it can support 2.5Gbps (2500Mbps / 2.5GBASE-T) on up to at least 100m of Cat5e or 5Gbps (5,000Mbps / 5GBASE-T) up to at least 100m of Cat6 cable. Apparently it can also deliver 5Gbps over Cat5e, but only in specific use cases.

The existing 10GBASE-T standard harnesses spectral bandwidth of 400MHz, while the new 2.5GBASE-T needs 100MHz and 5GBASE-T uses 200MHz.

Peter Jones, Chairman of the NBASE-T Alliance, said:

“From proposal to approval, the standards process took less than two years – a remarkably fast progression. Seeing the standard approved so quickly has been an enormously satisfying experience, and shows what can be achieved when we work together to develop a compelling solution that offers clear value to the industry.”

Admittedly if you have the older cable (most of you will) then you’ll still have to buy a new router / network kit in order to take full advantage of the extra speed, but I wouldn’t bother. As for businesses, those that really need the extra speed have probably already swapped their cables rather than the networking kit (assuming that kit already supports the fastest standards).

Right now most home users have no great need for multi-Gigabit networks and by the time you do then in all likelihood your hardware will have already changed through natural progression to support the latest changes.

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Mark-Jackson
By Mark Jackson
Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on X (Twitter), Mastodon, Facebook and .
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