I was involved in the design of a commercial building's network. There
are about 1100 drops, each with a home run to a central wiring closet.
When the building was renovated, about 25 years ago, Cat-5 hadn't made
it to market. At that time it was guessed that whatever type of
networking was coming, that it would run on twisted pair, rather than
the transceiver cables we were using then. That was a good guess, but
the cat-3 cable that was run wouldn't handle the network traffic, so it
needed to be replaced with cat-5.
My point is that no matter what media you run now, it will still be
perfectly fine, as intended, but will need to be replaced to work with
the new standards. When we spec'd this building we made sure that there
were wiring chases, conduit and wiremold in place so that the cables
could be pulled out and replaced without tearing out the walls.
No matter what wire you run, design in a method to allow for the
replacement of the wiring at a later date. In my own home I installed
conduit from each data drop up into the attic so that the wires could be
changed, or added to easily. In addition to running the cat-5 wire in
the conduit, I also added a pull string. If you have a 2 story house,
with a basement, you can run the first floor wiring down to the
basement, and the second floor wiring to the attic, just be sure there
is a wire chase to get from the attic to basement!
You can't foresee all the possible future problems with this kind of
installation, but you can at least design things to be "not too"
difficult to add to later as needed.
Good luck.
Peace,
Pat
Randall wrote:
>>It'd be pretty silly to pay extra for the
>>cable, and not use the right components throughout the system.
>>
>>
>
>The exception to that would be if you're only using Cat 6 as a "future
>proofing"
>effort, and are willing to replace (hopefully easily accessible) connectors if
>you do try to upgrade beyond Gigabit Ethernet.
>
>FWIW, long time ago we installed Cat 5 with Cat 3 connectors for the same
>reason. Found that in most cases it worked just fine at 100 MHz. But then, we
>weren't pushing it right to the distance limit, either.
>
>Randall
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