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After seeing that my wireless speeds were much faster than the speeds I was getting over Ethernet, I decided to invest in some new cables. I didn't know it before, but I saw while I was changing them out that my current cables were Cat 5e. While putting my network together, I had just been grabbing whatever cables I could find in my scrap drawers. Now I have Cat 8 cables and my speeds jumped from 7MB/s to an average of over 40MB/s. It's a much bigger improvement than I expected, especially for such a small investment.

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[-] normonator@lemmy.ml 166 points 10 months ago

Cat8 is pointless with gigabit equipment as far as speed goes. Cat6 will do 10gig, you just had bad cables.

[-] IsoKiero@sopuli.xyz 28 points 10 months ago

Yep. I'm running 1/1Gbps wan connection over cat5e just fine. Even on very noisy environment at work with a longish run (70+ meters) we ran pretty damn stable 1/1Gbps over good quality cat7.

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[-] SaltySalamander@fedia.io 107 points 10 months ago

Cat 5e

The fact that your old cable was cat5e has no bearing whatsoever on you getting shit speeds before changing cables. The gigabit spec was codified and products were on the market before the cat5e spec was ratified. Gigabit ethernet was literally made for standard cat5. I bet your previous cable was terminated incorrectly, and was only using two of the four pairs, limiting you to 100mbit.

[-] BearOfaTime@lemm.ee 31 points 10 months ago

Bingo!

Proper termination can be a bitch.

[-] gibmiser@lemmy.world 18 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

Orange white, orange

Green white, blue

Blue white, green

Brown white, brown

Learned it 20 years ago, never used it. how did I do?

[-] confusedbytheBasics@lemmy.world 6 points 10 months ago
[-] dgriffith@aussie.zone 11 points 10 months ago

I have not cared about or terminated A-spec after network cards gained auto MDI/MDIX about 20 years ago.

[-] rebelsimile@sh.itjust.works 5 points 10 months ago

yeah I did this almost 30 years ago and could recite it from scratch, haven’t made a cable since hs

[-] teawrecks@sopuli.xyz 2 points 10 months ago

I forget the order 5 times in the middle of crimping each side, so you're doing better than me.

[-] slazer2au@lemmy.world 2 points 10 months ago

Ewwww orange first? Why are you making a crossover cable backwards for?

[-] towerful@programming.dev 7 points 10 months ago

I thought T568B at each end was standard practice these days

[-] slazer2au@lemmy.world 5 points 10 months ago

Depends where in the world you are.

We use A in Australia and from what I have seen in western Europe A is also used more.

[-] nova_ad_vitum@lemmy.ca 55 points 10 months ago

It's highly likely that you had one or more bad-but-not-dead cables (like a weak termination) that was limiting your speed. By swapping everything out you fixed the problem. Cat 5e to 8 definitely shouldn't have caused that much if a jump (if any).

[-] GaMEChld@lemmy.world 22 points 10 months ago

Absolutely correct. CAT 5e should be able to max out at 125MB/s.

[-] cmnybo@discuss.tchncs.de 36 points 10 months ago

Cat5e works fine for gigabit. If it's not connecting at 1G, then the cable has been damaged and is probably connecting at 100M.

You should be seeing about 118MB/s in an iperf test on gigabit ethernet.

[-] rtxn@lemmy.world 4 points 10 months ago

This. I've had issues at work while imaging classroom computers where some would finish in ~30 minutes and a few would need hours. All of the computers used Cat6 cables. This being a classroom, and students being absolute wankbags, they kept yanking the computers and kicking the cables, so the wires came loose from the plugs. I later used ethtool to debug the slow computers -- the switch would only allow 10baseT link modes.

[-] dgriffith@aussie.zone 3 points 10 months ago

For later reference, the link light on most network cards is a different colour depending on link speed. Usually orange for 1G, green for 100M and off for 10M (with data light still blinking).

[-] catloaf@lemm.ee 1 points 10 months ago

But that depends on the card. And some gigabit devices won't do 10Mb at all.

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[-] Shimitar@feddit.it 32 points 10 months ago

My guess you had broken cables or defective connectors. Because even on cat5 (not cat5e) you should get much more than 7mbit, or did you have coaxial? LoL.

In my experience 90% are plugs, specially if you crimped yourself with Chinese tools

[-] eskuero@lemmy.fromshado.ws 23 points 10 months ago

Your connection is 40MB/s I assume

5e is capable of getting the full 1Gbps of my connection so I easily see over 90MB/s. That being said I bought a big 100m bulk years ago and have been clipping it myself with care.

If you were indeed using leftover/ free cables of cuestionable quality it indeed could be a reason for poor perfomance

[-] just_another_person@lemmy.world 21 points 10 months ago

Cat8 is not the benefit here. It's all twisted pairs as any other CAT cable. You probably just had a shitty quality cable.

[-] possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip 2 points 10 months ago

Or ones (or one) that was worn out.

[-] BearOfaTime@lemm.ee 1 points 10 months ago

Yep, a break from being wrapped up tightly a bunch of times

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[-] carl_dungeon@lemmy.world 17 points 10 months ago

You can get gigabit over 5e, you don’t need super expensive cables. That said I ran cat 6 through my whole house and am able to fully saturate the bus, about 115 MBps (920 Mbps) which accounts for the TCP overhead. I haven’t tried 2/5/10G on it bull I’ll probably upgrade in a few years, I don't expect to have much trouble getting good speeds. Your biggest issue was you might not have had all the cable pairs in your wire, or your cables ends might have been crusty, or you could have had bad kinks in the wire causing packet loss, or some real absolute trash quality wire. In general, 5e and 6 are plenty for most people/situations to get good speeds (1Gb+)

[-] avidamoeba@lemmy.ca 17 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

Cat 5e does 2.5Gb. Getting higher spec cables might increase the probability of them being well made to spec but other than that, what you really need is good quality cables, Cat 5e or otherwise.

[-] fubarx@lemmy.ml 13 points 10 months ago
[-] ShepherdPie@midwest.social 5 points 10 months ago

Someone took Monster's "$100 gold plated HDMI" cable and one-upped it.

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[-] Passerby6497@lemmy.world 12 points 10 months ago

I'd be interested to see if you swapped the cables back if your local interface negotiated to FE instead of GE. I wouldn't be surprised to find that you've got a pair that's not properly terminated or broken and dropping you down to 100Mbps.

[-] possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip 11 points 10 months ago

40MB/s is no where near the limit of cat 5e. It can easily do gigabit.

[-] BCsven@lemmy.ca 2 points 10 months ago

Not all cat 5e is created equal...you can buy a good cat5e from a reputable supplier or a super shit one at the dollar store...they just stamp 5e on it even if it is under sized wire and not actually been tested to work

[-] possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip 3 points 10 months ago

Cat 5e cables are tested to meet the cat 5e standard. Anything outside of that is false advertising and you should return it for a full refund

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[-] avidamoeba@lemmy.ca 2 points 10 months ago

Well if it can't do the spec, then it's not Cat 5e is it. 😅

[-] schizo@forum.uncomfortable.business 2 points 10 months ago

My favorite failure was when someone used solid-core cabling for all their patch cables instead of stranded and kept bitching about how unreliable everything was.

Which, of course, it is when you use the wrong cable and it keeps breaking as you move it around.

[-] WhyJiffie@sh.itjust.works 8 points 10 months ago

I have stable ~950 MBit/s to the NAS with Cat5e. That's ~115 MB/s. If that 40 is to a machine on the LAN, either there is some bottle neck at one of the ends, or there's some problem with the cable to the RJ-45 jacks.

[-] RelativeArea0@lemmy.world 5 points 10 months ago

Also learned this the hard way, when i was starting my "homelab" , I bought a box of (not knowingly that its bad) cheap CCA(copper clad alum) cat6 cables and im wondering why are my access points not negotiating to gigabit, turns out cca are trash and shouldn't be used on POE or even on high speed trunks, learned my lesson now and swapped my cables to pure copper, they are more expensive like 100$ more expensive but at least they do the job.

[-] catloaf@lemm.ee 2 points 10 months ago

CCA shouldn't be used anywhere ever. It's garbage cable for garbage people who will pinch a penny and end up spending ten times that in dealing with the issues and the eventual replacement.

[-] Mellow12@lemmy.world 4 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

Ethernet speeds historically were measured in 10/100. In my past life I worked for an a small rural isp. And part of my learning I was taught that cat5 was 8 strands of wire, or 4 twisted pairs. I got very familiar with crimping patch cables. If one strand were cut a network card would negotiate down to its lowest speed and still work at 10mbps. Operating on 4 wire or two pairs. It’s possible with those numbers you had a bad connection, or a broken strand in the cable and it auto negotiated down to 10mbps. To this day I still crimp my own cables, and I own a cheap cable tester to make sure the crimps and cables are good.

[-] Decronym@lemmy.decronym.xyz 2 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:

Fewer Letters More Letters
IP Internet Protocol
NAS Network-Attached Storage
PoE Power over Ethernet
TCP Transmission Control Protocol, most often over IP

[Thread #915 for this sub, first seen 10th Aug 2024, 16:35] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

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this post was submitted on 09 Aug 2024
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