The Infrastructure Manager

When specifying a new cabling system for a building, we need to make the decision as to whether we install Category 5e or Category 6 cabling. It’s sometimes a difficult decision as you need to take into consideration what you think will happen in the future.

CAT5e can support 1gb and CAT6 can support 1gb and beyond. If you have no immediate requirements for >1gb take into consideration how long you’ll be in the building - if it’s a relatively short period of time you probably don’t need to worry about CAT6.

CAT6 costs roughly speaking, about 30% more than 5e so if you’re in the building for a long period of time you can safeguard your investment by spending the additional 30% but on the other hand if you’re unlikely to need the additional throughput that’s potentially 30% you could have saved!

When considering the costs of CAT6, don’t forget that to run at full CAT6 speeds you need to use CAT6 patch leads, which cost about double a standard CAT5e lead.

Finally, the last consideration with installing a CAT6 is the bend radius - the cable is about 1.5 x the thickness of a CAT5e cable, and since neither CAT5e or CAT6 cables should be bent at 90 degrees it means that you can’t put as many cables in the trunking if the route involves a 90 degree bend (i.e. a trunking drop from the ceiling to skirting trunking around the room). This in practice means you would need to install more ceiling drops, hardly a major implication but necessary.

What cabling systems are you installing? Do you have a decision making process as to what you’ll install?