CAT 5e

CAT 6

Fiber Optics

Network Wiring
CAT 6

• • •

Category 6 cable may not look much different than CAT 5e; but it is what is on the inside that makes the difference. The key difference is in the performance. CAT6 cabling provides twice the bandwidth (200 MHz) and 16 times better than Signal-to-Noise margins compared with Cat 5e. Studies performed in the TIA power separation task group indicate that Category 6 has twice the noise immunity from external interference compared to Category 5e. Better cabling can alleviate problems due to equipment variations or excessive noise in the environment.

Category 6 cabling provides advantages for the most demanding applications on the market today. These include broadband video and IP Telephony. To successfully implement IP telephony requires a network with a high Quality of Service. Although IP telephony doesn't need much bandwidth, it is sensitive to errors on the network. These errors have much more effect on a voice signal than on a data signal, since voice is real time, and a lost frame is immediately apparent in the quality of speech.

For today’s applications Cat 6 provides higher Data Throughput (fewer bit errors) than Cat 5e for 100BASE-TX and 1000BASE-T applications. For future applications, CAT 6 is well positioned to support more demanding applications such as multi-channel broadband video with an extended frequency range up to 550 MHz and digital video signals as high as 2 Gb/s for HDTV and future multi-Gigabit applications.

Other Network Wiring Solutions from ICS:
CAT 5e | Fiber Optics