Great video, thanks a lot. I just equipped my new home with 23 Cat8 cables across the entire building, because I do not want to ever touch this installation again. So this should last for the next decades and for me the invest was worth it. Soon, the Cat8 keystones will be installed on both ends.
Great video. One slight clarification. The larger AWG wire for Cat 8 is not for allowing more data transmission through due to surface area. It is easier for the wire manufacturer to control the twisting of the wire pairs in a more precise way to reduce the crosstalk. The goal on each successive option is to operate at higher frequencies and reduce more crosstalk which is beyond the scope of this discussion. That is what allows greater transmission speed.
I did Cat 8 because all my walls were torn out during a renovation. I figured there’s no easier time to just completely future proof my home network. Yes it was extremely expensive with the keystones and field terminations but a $2000 investment beats the hell out of having to redo it at somepoint.
Who would have expected (back in the days of the 80's cat3-4) to be running 2GHz over twisted pair -it was generally accepted such signals were within the relm of coax.
5:00 that is not specific to CAT8 though, you can get the exact same keystone for Cat 6 as well. It's what we have been using even since CAT6 became available. Entirely depends on the manufacturer of the keystone module. Also I strongly advise against putting a plug on an "installation cable" (in Europe this is considered to be a botched job), these cables are meant to be terminated with a keystone module and then left alone inside your rack. Reason being the solid wires inside these cables break rather easily when bent/twisted/manipulated frequently and that leads to all sorts of "fun" connection issues.
Sounds like the best future proofing is to also run blue ‘smurf’ tube everywhere so you can eventually pull the thinner, cheaper cable that will make Cat 8 obsolete - whatever THAT is.
I've only been retired five years and there are three new cable types. We weren't getting most requests for Cat.5E. Only a few Cat 6. This is mostly customer generated as to cable type. Most of them have equipment they won't be replacing soon. If they were moving into a building that they're buying and doing major refurbishment I'd suggest going to the highest type emphasizing the cost of rewiring later at a higher cost. I talked a customer who was moving to wire his Unix system with unshielded twisted pair and adapters and patch panels so he could go to a PC system one day.He agreed but wasn't keen on it because his computer person said Unix would always be around. Well, his building was struck by lightning and everything was destroyed. His computer guru said he couldn't replace it so he had to go to a Windows based network. Thats when my advice was appreciated. They just removed the UNIX system reversed the connections to the patch panels and Digi Boards and the network was running.
Cat 7 is not recognized by TIA/EIA and thus is NOT a standard in the United States. Cat 6 was ratified the same year Cat 7 was proposed and rejected. Cat 8 however is a recognized standard by TIA/EIA.
@@scythelord yep, 7 never became an official standard AFAIK. Cat 6A was ratified in 2009 if my memory is correct, and I'm pretty sure it's a TIA/EIA standard so it's industry supported as well. Cat 6A and 8 have their place and use, but IMO they are extremely specialized and very very few people need the performance and abilities these standards offer.
@@ChristopherGoggans I have no idea why anyone would want to deal with Cat7 or Cat8. They are a total pain to deal with and fiber is better in just about every way now.
I used to run £1m rollouts of hardware including LAN and internet, we discovered that making the cables by hand was inferior to factory machine made cables, and they lasted only about 2 years before the performance started to drop off. Once we started buying custom factory made cables we got far less LAN issues.
Cat 5 was the latest tech when I did Cisco networking in high school and college and 5e came out shortly after. I wired my home with cat 5 and 5e and did a few small offices where I was doing build outs as I was a pro painter and did framing, drywall, and electrical....pretty much everything for typical commercial buildings. Things change fast and I have only had to do a few patch cables in the last 10 years or so.
Seeing the pricing you've found is very interesting! Here in Canada, the pricing I can find lines up with yours for cat6 and cat6a, but cat 7 doubles it and is much closer to the price of cat8 than cat6a!
It would be helpful if towards the beginning of the video, you specified (labeled) which cable was what color. Blue = x, Yellow = y. I spent alot of time early in the video guessing which cable was which. Great information tho. Well explained.
I did an install of 300 points 7 years ago. Did the same calculations and installed Cat 6. Most runs were under 30m. So still capable of 10G today. Pre terminated fibre is so cheap. So if you want to future proof install a run of fiber with cat 6 even if you don't use it. The only advantage of copper over fiber is POE. The other cool thing about fiber is you can haul a multi fibre cable and with one run have 24 or more pairs. Here in Australia it has the added benefit of almost having no installation requirements in S009. Whereas copper has seperation, weight and now power dissipation.
Nice Video! I am working as an electrician here in Austria and in my company we only install cat.7 cables and use tool-less cat.6a or 7 keystones. If I recall correctly the bigger conductor size of cat.8 is because of the skin effect. High frequency currents only travel on the surface of the conductor !
@@AlejandroTaylorEscribano The Frequency is tied to the transmission speed Higher Frequencies give you higher Bandwidth. There are male and female , RJ45 keystones available Female are the ones you use in special wall sockets that come empty so the keystones act as receptacles
The only place I use Cat 8 is from my computer to my modem/router. The rest is 5e for the time being. May upgrade to 6e/7 in the future. Thanks for a very informative video for the masses.
@@kinghomer999 Not the router. I had Cat 8 on hand and used it. Plain and simple. I should not have to replace it for a long, long time...perhaps never.
If you need more than 10 G you just use fiber instead. You can have 40 or 100 G with cheap QSFP(+) modules. So just use cat 6a for copper connectivity, anything better is useless because, fiber.
that's kind of what i've been thinking about. a fusion splicer is NOT needed to terminate fiber OM3/OM4 if you get a kit or the right stuff, just make sure to measure twice and cut one and i guess you could just pull it on the wall along with 6A, 5e and RG6 if you wanted the full buffet.
@@cdoublejj You look around OM3 and OM4 can be manufactured to a specific length, its not even expensive to buy, in total spent less than £1000 to fiber the whole house (9 rooms plus 2 out rooms), 10 gig to every room (40 gig to office) All the cables made to measure, a switch "borrowed" from work job done.
Well actually for big data center you want to use copper as much as possible! Copper is always faster than fiber in short runs. Cat 8 support 40 and 100 Gig-E! Since Fibers always introduce latency and the more you have fiber the more you introduce latency, in the end, it adds up. But agree with you if you don't have hundreds of transactional server I would go with fiber. Each datacenter have to go through an evaluation of its needs.
@@NMETSGChan yes short runs most definitely but it seems the critical runs lately are distance and further away from the data centers. I’m shocked they are not making copper runs greater for distance.
Thank you for the information. I'm not building a network, but the info will aid me in building a patch cable for RF equipment between a control head and base unit.
@@anttimaki8188 I install network cabling for a living and we like to use the Panduit Mini-com jacks, no punch-down tool required, and I find they are a lot faster on terminating and entire closet.
@@NehpetsNosliw I only do these occasionally, comes with electrician Job. I use whatever the boss has bought. Havnt seen punchdowns for a while though, mostly these clipping ones. Then theres those that got a tool that punch and cut all 8 wires simultaneosly. But If you only do these like every other month its kinda hard to sell the idea to boss :)
Just a job.. here in Russia we use only Cat 5. Speeds over 1G are only reachable with fiber-optic. Cat 6-8 are not acceptable because of money/speed proportion.
@ 2:34 in the video, a lot of the CAT6a i've bought in the past 2 or so years looks nearly if not exactly identical to that CAT7, so long as it's SFTP or FSTP aka fully shielded twisted pair.
@@MikeFaucher d seem exceeding spec is not issue, at least with some 6a which i think some is even 23 gauge. but, cat 7 REQUIRES these features. 8 seems to be a true upgrade. mostly best for data center. or equipped to deal with PoE++ which can push 75 watts of power minus overhead. EDIT: also 25gbit on 6a through 8 would be interesting to see
I only use field termination plugs, much better for shielding. The wires get unshielded at both ends if you use a typical RJ45, that’s were a lot of the interference will happen.
When im doing the keystones and the final squeeze, i use a small notebook or like a pamphlet over the connector. Some thick paper and its much easier to squeeze the sucker all the way. Doesnt hurt your fingers that much either.
I'm interested in seeing the cost comparison between Cat7/Cat8 and fibre. In our network, we don't even bother with copper anymore for 10Gbit links. Costs for fibre and SFP+ adapters have really made the market competitive.
Agreed. Any time I'm looking at greater than 1G, I look to fiber, or DAC for shorter links. 10G-T is too expensive, and uses far too much power; 'tho it is getting better. Also, maybe I'm just too old... I don't see any need for 10G+ to my laptop, desktop, TV, etc.
nice video, hopefully CAT7 and 10G ethernet is gonna start to become the norm more and more but i dont see yet how anyone will need 40G in their home network anytime soon.
Agreed, but ive also never met someone that could fully saturate Cat6a even in the home, aside from a rare enterprise 10g or 2g bonded connection form the ISP, and in that case even the cable is installed by the ISP from the Modem to the Router. I have full fiber gigabit internet in a large overkill network in my home nd I still run Cat5e because no single appliance/end user will be saturating a full gigabit even... And I have servers, 4k cameras etc...
Cat7 is not needed for 10G. It only needs Cat6 or Cat6a depending on cable length. More than 55 meters needs 6A, and the vast majority of home network installations won't even come close to that.
Im doing Cat 6a regularly these days, its cheap and easy, and will be viable for a long time. Just pains me when i come back to panel and the user is using cheapest cat5 patches they can find to connect it all :D
It's been probably 20 years since I terminated any Cat 5 cables which were not really that hard. I'm glad I retired from the business, because I can't imagine the patience need to terminate these Cat 7 & 8 cables. Good grief. They must be 10 times as expensive as the old Cat 5 cables I used.
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Cat 7 & 8 are extremely rare, it's easier (and cheaper) use fiber optics
Did my whole house up with that cat8 linkup cable earlier this year. Nice cable but those connectors were kind of a pain. I ended up scoring the jacket on the wires where the contacts meet them. This helped with make reliable connections more consistently.
I’m reading on the product information page for bulk cat8 cable that most Ethernet ports on devices are not properly grounded. Do I need to ground the shielding somehow, or is it just overkill? Trying to search the Internet and not really getting a clear answer. e.g. product B07JQ2GSFQ on Amazon. Down in the description it states : "Important Note ***Routers, switches and modems with proper RJ45 port grounding recommended. Unshielded devices can generate an "Antenna Effect" and can cause network bottle-necking when used with dual shielded wires.***”
Only for POE+, even then you could see a significant voltage drop over certain distances. Especially in use with balanced wattage applications, a larger conductor will hurt at a certain point. I think Cat6a is actually the sweet spot for this as far as carrying power is concerned.
Hi, great video. I am just in the process of upgrading my home network. I have cat8 running to my outhouse office (25m run from router). I had to cut the Cat8 lead to fit through the hole in the wall. To join the cable back together i couldn’t find a Cat8 lead connector anywhere online, only Cat7. Would a Cat7 extension connector limit the Cat8 speed or am i best soldering the 2 cut ends back together ?
Thanks for the feedback. It is appreciated. I would not solder. Here are a couple that I have tried with no issues, and there are many others as well. amzn.to/44id9JS, amzn.to/3JRArOz assuming you are running 10G
I don't know why youtube decided that this should be in my recommended, but there is one thing I wonder and that is about the copper tape at 7:20. I know from personal experience that the adhesive side of aluminum tape is not conductive (I made a faraday cage inside a wooden box with alu tape). That is why I wonder if copper tape really makes contact with the ground wire or if the crimping from the locking boot is enough to push the glue away to make a firm connection to ground.
Man, if you are running inside of walls, use the best cables available. The labor costs of changing it later (or retrofitting it now) are way higher than the incremental cost of the cables and parts.
I've installed "Cat 5e" CCA UTP cables about 8 years ago because it was cheapest. Now i'm replacing all of them with dual branded cat 6A U/FTP cable and shielded keystone modules everywhere, except for the IP cameras, those are Cat 5e FTP (Cu). I remember arguing with someone about 2 years ago about cat 7 vs cat 8. I said "there is no cat 8, you must probably mean cat 7". I was wrong, so it seems?
Excellent video. Many thanks. Fully agree. 6a is the sweet spot as you can still use normal crimp RJ45 shielded termination. Cat 7 upwards just a pain! but I can see a use for datacentres. For residential and business building to building or server to a comms I always run armoured optical pairs with 2 pairs redundant. Better performance, and more future proof than copper. Also price difference to Cat8 is negligible when all things considered.
Assuming you have 1GbE networking in your house and with that speed, you will not gain anything. This is mainly for 10GbE internal networking. Thanks for the question.
I only have 1 ethernet cable in my home and it's a Flat Cat7 that goes from the modem to my pc (aorund 15meters). To connect my server room to my nework i have used an optic fiber cable (around 30 meters) and with it i don't have inteference problem and thick shields and thick cables.
What about different Connectors like ARJ45 or TERA - I have not seen Network Switches with these sort of Connector Types so far - although I was told there are a few?
I don't think TERA will ever become popular, especially since the standard is already 17 years old and still not used. The mian reason is compatibility. On the other hand ARJ45 looks promising, but looking at how it works, it seems like that connector will require support from the switch on both sides to work, and it will waste 4 wires in the cable, so I doubt it will happen. To be hones I don't think any new standards will appear, since we are slowly getting to the point where fiber optic devices are getting affordable. And the advantages of FO over copper are just too big. I think copper network wires will disapear before we will get consumer available 1 Tb/s internet connections.
The standard for cat 6a cable is 23 awg. I see a lot of vendors sale cat 6a cabkes in 26 and 28 awg. How will smaller gauge conductor affect performance?
Typically the smaller wire is multi-strand wire an$ is what they use for patch cables. Very hard to work with if you crimp your own but multi strand allows you to use smaller wire and get the same performance.
Thinking of buying Cat 6A, and I'm confused with not finding Ethernet Cat 6a in stores, only Patch Cat 6a, and there isn't anything mentioned in specs of the speed, would patch work the same like ethernet Cat 6a?
Either will work, patch or bulk. The only difference is that patch is usually thinner as it is multi strand wire and usually can't be easier cut and re-terminated. Otherwise the performance is the same. If you are looking for bulk, there is an amazon link in the video description where you can buy a bulk roll. Thanks for the question.
@@MikeFaucher I need 2 cables for PC, and PS4, both connected to router, and with shipping Cat 6a would cost me just 5 Euros cheaper then 2 Cat 8 cables from Wish, what would you suggest, is Cat 8 worth those 5 Euros then? Not so much of a difference in money, but in quality? Both are S/FTP
I was looking at patch cables today, and it seems that many companies are putting 26 AWG wire in their cat 6A patch cables, but using thicker wire in the cat 6 cable, which baffles me, because i often see like in your chart that you show 23 AWG wire for the 6A cabling. It seems like in patch cables, the more expensive 6a is using thinner wire!
Which fact do you mean? It depends on the environment. For long distances optic transmission is better suited. But for an in-house installation Ethernet is better suited. Because if you use optical transmission, you still need an active(!) media converter to RJ45 (which needs electricity). Furthermore, Ethernet provides Power over Ethernet which is super convenient for Wifi access points or cameras or an interphone system. Last but not least, fibre cabling is very sensitive and less flexible with respect to the bending radius.
I think actually the future is going to be wireless only for office and home use. They can get crazy speeds over short distances on the millimeter wave band. Speeds that a copper cable will never even approach. Optics will always cost a bit more due to the fact that rare earth metals are needed so it's wireless where cost is a concern. For industrial and data center applications fiber optics is the way to go.
I'd hate to do a whole wiring job with that stuff! I have found CAT7 to be useful when on shortish runs where interference from other sources (video, electrical...) cannot be avoided. Haven't worked with CAT8 yet. Both remind me of shielded token ring wiring, as it was pretty good about making it through factories with lots of high voltage equipment without loss.
@@MikeFaucher So was token ring! That was even better than those giant cables for S/36. Don't miss that at all. Of course we couldn't plug everything into Ethernet then, let alone wi-fi. One worker might have had a twinax for a terminal, another for a printer, token ring for a PC and a phone line and a fax line. Thanks for the video and your effort.
Many of the patch cables use multi-stranded wire with is much thinner so the overall is much thinner. The bulk wire in this video uses thicker solid wire.
Folks, please don’t believe everything you see on Amazon. I work on both the US and global standards development organizations that develops all of the cabling category standards and I’m going to provide a few facts about the different categories of cables and their constructions/specifications. UTP=no shielding at all. F/UTP=unshielded pairs with an overall foil shield. Sc/UTP=unshielded pairs with a screened (braided) shield. F/FTP=shielded pairs with overall foil shielded. Sc/FTP=shielded pairs with screened shield. Cat5e through cat6 can be constructed with any of the above depending on the users requirements. Cat7 and up must be Sc/FTP because of the extended frequency range. The shielded pairs mitigate internal crosstalk and the screen mitigates alien crosstalk between cables in a bundle. Cat5e=100 MHz, 1Gb/s at 100m, any connector style. Cat6= 250MHz, 1Gb/s at 100m, 10Gb/s at 55m, any connector style. Cat6A= 500 MHz, 10Gb/s at 100m, any connector style. Cat7= 600 MHz, 10Gb/s at 100m, only EC7, GG45 or TERA connectors (google them), RJ45 not supported. CatA= 1000 MHz, 10Gb/s at 100m, 25Gb/s at 50m, only EC7, GG45 or TERA connectors, RJ45 not supported. Cat8.1= 2000MHz, 10Gb/s at 100m, 40 Gb/s at 30m, any connector style. Cat8.2=2000 MHz, 10Gb/s at 100m, only EC7, GG45 or TERA connectors, RJ45 not supported. Multigig/NBaseT = 2.5Gb on cat 5e or better to 100m, 5Gb on Cat 6 or better at 100m, 10Gb on cat 6A or better to 100m. Depending on cable quality you might get 5Gb on cat 5e and 10Gb on cat 6, no guarantees. So, the “cat 7” connectors you bought on Amazon are BS because as you see from the information above, cat 7 does not support RJ45 connectors. That’s a fact. So why can cat 8 be used on RJ45 in addition to the other connectors I mentioned? It political as most Standardisation is. The US (ANSI/TIA TR 42.7 committee) never adopted cat 7 or 7A because some companies refused to move away from theRJ45 for fear that users would not support a solution that was not backward compatible. The ISO/IEC SC25/WG3 committee did ratify 7/7A components. Terminated links are called Class F and Class FA respectively. With Cat 8 we had the same concerns in the US so two grades were created, 8.1 and 8.2. The transmission specifications are identical but it much easier to achieve with the non-RJ45 connectors. I hope this helps and I’m happy to discuss via comments or privately if anyone has questions.
Hey Mike, great video. I noticed that I can get Cat6 in shielded and non shielded, but Cat6a and 7 and 8 are all shielded. I assumed as you need higher frequencies you need shielding. Do you think if I go with Cat6 I need shielding in my house? Thanks!
So I have two cat 8 cables that are only 26AWG really weird but it works. I had to solder the leads to the Cat8 RJ45 clam shell connector since it’s so thin.
@@MikeFaucher ah okay, I have just have a 1 gb network rn was thinking abt building up a PFSense box with a 10 gb nic. You think I should opt for some 24 gage cat 8 or just stick with the patch
@@restrelax6282 Pfsense will not take advantage of anything over 1G. I would suggest putting 10G switches and 10G Nics for internal traffic to NAS or Media servers. For 10G you can CAT 6A or Cat 7 Patch and use 6A shielded for the in-wall stuff.
I hope someone can give me some advise. I want to purchase cat 8 cables, but they have to be ran through a wall, so I would have to connect it to a wall plate. I can only find cat 6 wall plates on Amazon. If I used them, what would happen to the benefit of the cat 8 speed and so on?
I have links to all of it in the video description below the video in both videos. Cat 8 is very stiff when running through walls as it does not bend well. It can be done but it will be tougher. I would also consider using Cat 6A or 7 as it is much cheaper and a little easier to work with (th-cam.com/video/f2bILsfu8NM/w-d-xo.html). You will be able to get the 10GbE with 6A or 7.
For a majority of applications, just run 6a. It hits all the needs for most businesses, small, home, and enterprise. Inside the data center is a little different.
Aren't we starting to lose the cost benefit of copper over fiber with the increased copper mass of these cables? Even factoring in the cost of 10G SFPs it looks like a fiber would be cheaper for a 30 meter run.
Cat 8 is supposed to be compatible with 40G over copper (I don't know if the standard is ratified, as I have not seen any RJ45-compatible hardware faster than 10G). That said, cost of fiber optic networks is decreasing. Even when you factor in cost of transceivers, that's rough to RJ45. You can run like 6 times more connections trough same space thanks to fiber being so slim. At this point I can see only one downside of fiber optics - if you need custom length you need some pretty expensive tools. For anything shorter than 10m you can go to copper DACs, which are usually on par with RJ45 cost wise. Then, on both SFP, QSFP and OSFP you can run 25, 40, 50 (now on SFP thanks to SFP56 standard), 100, 200, 400 and now 800 Gb. My company recently installed couple of 400G switches and seeing 400 to 8x SFP56 octopus breakout cable is wild. I've never seen Cat8 deployed anywhere outside a research lab, but Cat 7 is kind of popular in high EMI machines as internal wiring and communication between different modules, where galvanic separation is not required.
Couple of questions: do you think the connectors on aliexpress are really cat8. And does it slow that much down that you cant get the rated speeds if you use real cat8 cable and cat6/6a connectors? Do you know some make cables that are for sure cat7a+ / cat8? Because i think there are a lot of fake/outside specs cables. And the last question, i cant find any stranded cat7a+ / cat8 cable, does that mean all are solid, so from wall socket to pc that needs to be also solid?
I could be way off but giving how long it took to make those Cat 7/8 terminations, wouldn't fiber with SFPs be a much better way to go? Even if you had to use a media converter for end user devices to connect between RJ45 and the LC2 wall jack?
I had to run a ethernet cables on the roof of a high power radio tower building, Cat 5E UTP couldn't work well and was trying to link up at 10mbps, but Cat 5e STP (shielded) worked fine at gigabit speeds, even at high 100MHz noise level. So to me cat 8 is for very specific uses at higher speeds, and I might as well use fiber at that point.
Geez. Looking into how-to videos to run ethernet through attic to the kids rooms using cat 5.. Just stumbled on this video. Wow. Cat 7 and 8! Which should I use just for basic internet to kids rooms?
Definitely do not buy "Cat7" or Cat8 cables for any type of home situation. Quality Cat5e, Cat6 or Cat6A cable are more than enough to suit your needs. Any "Cat7" cable you buy off of Amazon is not a real Cat7 cable - They're just repackaged/rebranded Cat6/6A cables. Cat8 is only intended to be used in the Data Center at this point, and is rarely being used, anyways.
Can you do a explainer of single pair Ethernet? I only found out about it recently which is rather embarrassing given that I pride myself as a rabid follower of networking news.
would you say that u/ftp cat6 would be similar to cat7? It looks the same, same outer braids with foiled individual twists. (twists about the same, unlike the tight cat8)
If I have CAT 7 through my house, is it worth replacing all my cables and switches to CAT 8? My ISP makes me use their router (I hate that), so I can't upgrade that (my previous ISP just gave me a cable modem and let me use my own router which was great!). Will I notice any speed increase?
No, I would definitely not upgrade if you have Cat 7. As a side note, almost every ISP router can be changed to a bridge allowing you to add your router. You just need to search TH-cam on the specific model/brand of router your ISP stuck you with to access the firmware on how to do it.
Here, in Eastern Europe I'm lucky to have a 1 Gbps connection. Most of the people has slower connection. I have put a 25 meter long Cat 6 cable in the wall. We will not have 40 Gbps anytime soon. And we don't really need it anyway.
The cool thing about these things isn't just about download speeds, but file sharing among local area networks. Especially for youtube channels like Linus Tech Tips, where they use 8k video. A 40 Gbps connection would up their file sharing speed by 4x. Considering they're using 10 Gbps, and still maxing out the bandwidth on those connections.
@@Valentin119 yeah you'd be amazed just how annoying it is to be stuck on 1Gbps for local stuff once you get used to 10, 20, 40Gbps. I have two servers that share large VM disk and and pass on the whole X session over ssh. It would be a pain to manage them over 1Gbps, instead I bought some "old" HP 10Gbps dual port NICs from ebay and sat them up in aggregated mode to get the 20Gbps full duplex (or like the marketing would say 40Gbps) Before that I was actually facing the issue that the router would be the bottle neck and all the trafic would be caped at 500Mbps because it had to send 500Mbps up and down to each server making it "1Gbps" but not really. Like Zorro I'm lucky to have 1Gbps internet, but I wish my ISP would give me access to 10Gbps, not just for blazing fast por.... "creative content" but for actually start to migrate some of my network over to local data centers around the city, as of right now it's just not worth spending money on external servers if I'd be limiting myself to 1Gbps. it's fast for sure, but not really fast enough for really heavy data (as seen from Linux Tech Tips)... but then again it wouldn't be 30 dollars (299NOK) a month either :D
@@svampebob007 I'm only sitting at 275Mbps, it is plenty for my internet needs. My wife intends to do video editing, and doing youtube stuff for fun, and I want to create a mass storage server running a kind of raid variant. Not settled on which type to run yet. But something like these Cat 8 cables, or similar maybe 6a, is what I would like to speed of local data transfers to and from that mass storage. After I save up some money, I would eventually like to setup a mini home server, and network station, instead of needing to rely on my ISP's supplied cable modem.
@@Valentin119 TL;DR I'd recommend you take a look at SFP instead of RJ45. There's a lot of "old" discontinued server hardware on ebay that you can get for cheap. when I was looking at 10Gbps upgrade I saw the Asus 10Gbps Ethernet card and it cost 140USD for one single card, without cables included... ........................................................... Buying something like: 2xHP NC523FP with two 3M DAC (cable) = 85aus each so around 121USD for the whole thing that can do 20Gbps up and down. that's what I got and the only downside that it's only 3 meters cable (max 5M on DAC)... but both servers are located 2µm from each other :P I'm considering building an outside storage box for the servers (kinda like they did on Linus Tech Tips with their outside water loop) You can then go with fiber you can still get the NC523 or a similar dual 10Gbps NIC (some even go up to dual 40Gbps for cheap) and for connectivity you'll need the HP Blade System c-Class 10Gb (16USD) adapter and 30M Outdoor Field Fiber Patch Cord (56USD) The downside is that the adapters are kinda specific so you'll need to check the compatibility, and the cables are on the price of cat7-cat8 for 30M but those outdoor fiber patch cord come with a metal shield so it's easier to not break the fiber glass, you can go all the way up to 100M with fiber... but then it get's really freaking expensive for the adapters and quality cables... I trust eBay to sell medium range products, but if I was to spend more money I would be cautious about the actual quality of those fibers anything bellow 30M is pretty standard. Anyway good luck on your future project, relying on the ISP do give you a decent modem is the stupidest thing we do before investing in a good home network :)
@@svampebob007 Thanks for all the information! I'll have to keep that in mind! I am still in the process of obtaining all my certifications, currently working on my Networking from cisco and Comptia, so I am learning a whole bunch of stuff I never even knew about, glad I put off the project now, seeming that I definitely have more knowledge than I did back then, definitely would've done it wrong without knowing what I do now!
A vs B is literally just aesthetics. the electricity doesn't care which wire it uses for transmit and receive so long as both sides of the cable are the same. you can do 50% A runs and 50% B runs in the exact same site install and it will work just fine because the whole A and B thing was never real we just made it up.
@@MikeFaucherI guess what I mean is if I run a Cat 7 able but terminate with say RJ45 from 6a from a unify switch to a unify AP then how is the frequency of the signal running through the cable set? By the switch? If so, how does it know the max is 500Mhz vs 1000Mhz vs 2000Mhz assuming the switch is capable of all of these?
@@AlejandroTaylorEscribano The frequency of a cable is a max rating and is not set anywhere. What you are describing should work fine. Cable speed does not really come into play till you get to 10GbE speeds or higher.
The only real difference between these two are the green and orange pairs for backward compatibility with older phone systems. Most patch cables that are bought today are "B" and this is the standard for the US, however in Europe I believe they mostly use "A". As long as it is uniform in your network, it really does not matter but most new installs are using "B".
@@MikeFaucher do you know the coaxial cable specs that are required for docsis 4.0 ? im guessing we also need to change the cable due to frequency increase to 1.8ghz in docsis 4.0
Do you have standards for the connectors or at the standards just describing the cable? I mean - can you buy a certified RJ45 connector for lets say a Cat 8 cable?
In a small home, a Cat6 will be just as good as a Cat7 or Cat8. Here in Norway we all just skip the Cat7 all together, and we use mostly Cat6 in all kind of buildings. Sometimes we use Cat8 in bigger businesses, but rarely. I should also add that Cat7 and Cat8 is very close in price now in late 2022, and both is almost twice the price of Cat6
We will start to come full circle and hit Thinnet and finishing with Thicknet cabling. :) I have pulled all, and literally pulled on thinnet attached to Cat5 for ceiling run replacement, lol.
Cat8 is almost silly, its obsolete to fiber in price, distance and speed. Perhaps more practical for just patching since in that use case it would be quicker to install than splicing fiber. That being said for the utter majority of homes, small and medium business in the world that kind of available bandwidth for most of the runs they have would never be saturated. Or by the time it has a real practical use case it would have already been superseded by another available technology. Ive been installing for over a decade(Since 10bt token ring hubs etc) and I still recommend Cat5e for the majority of people, cat 6a for some of the backbone/CPE runs. Especially in residential applications its completely pointless.
Certainly agree that CAT 8 is a bit of waste, but there many out there including me that run 10G networks that need 6a or 7 for the longer runs. Thanks for the input.
@@TheRickJames Here where i live all new buildings has to have a fiber and Cat6 installed. Fiber is not usually used, the isp´s are using a fiber router and use the cat6's to split the internet to houses. But you CAN buy a fiber link if you really want to, The ISP will just use 2 fiber-Cat6 couplers one on the panel side, and one in house. its funny when i see it.
Result to Cat 6a output. You would need a complete Cat 8 connection from host to router/switch to support the full 40Gbps speed. Otherwise I believe you would max out at the 10Gbps output.
@@discodench The cable I am using is a little better than 8 inches but you are right, it is pretty thick and very stiff. If you are going to run it into a wall you can use an external junction box to allow for the bend but still a challenge.
Excellent price and comprehensive comparison. My only complaint is that you didn't include the cost of any terminators/keystone connectors because I assume those are more expensive than the cable. EDIT: Yes you did
Who doesn't love cat videos? :-D
Who doesn’t love dad jokes!
Were you looking for a cat video and found this by accident 🤔
😂😂😂😂😂
Really good one!
Great video, thanks a lot. I just equipped my new home with 23 Cat8 cables across the entire building, because I do not want to ever touch this installation again. So this should last for the next decades and for me the invest was worth it. Soon, the Cat8 keystones will be installed on both ends.
Awesome. That is what I call future proofing. Thanks for sharing.
@@MikeFaucher nothing personal but that is not future proofing that`s wasting money. Cat 6 is more than enough for residential and small businesses
For our new house we ran Cat6, Cat6a, Cat7, and OM3/OM4 fiber. :-)
Cat7 is sufficient enough.
@@momchil_v Can you predict the future. His house will last at least 30 years. Do you know what kinds of data speeds will be used in the year 2050?
Great video. One slight clarification. The larger AWG wire for Cat 8 is not for allowing more data transmission through due to surface area. It is easier for the wire manufacturer to control the twisting of the wire pairs in a more precise way to reduce the crosstalk.
The goal on each successive option is to operate at higher frequencies and reduce more crosstalk which is beyond the scope of this discussion. That is what allows greater transmission speed.
Thanks for the explanation and feedback.
I was today years old when I learned there was anything past CAT 6
Ok
Lmao why is this comment look like an oblivion npc conversation
You and me both Jerald!
Bruh same
I did Cat 8 because all my walls were torn out during a renovation. I figured there’s no easier time to just completely future proof my home network. Yes it was extremely expensive with the keystones and field terminations but a $2000 investment beats the hell out of having to redo it at somepoint.
I agree completely. Sounds great and thanks for sharing. Good luck with it.
$2000 ?? I bought 25 meters of cat 8 cable with 3 cat 8 connectors for each side and additional stuff for € 100.
Personally, I would do an OS2 fibre to be futureproof (>200gbe)...
Home run ENT/Smurf tube ftw. The future is whenever you feel like fishing it.
Funny how we went from thick coax cables to thin twisted pair cables and back to thick cabling again.
Just like how we have returned to vinyl records and paper grocery bags.
The good old twinax and IBM Type1 cables - how I don't miss those.
Who would have expected (back in the days of the 80's cat3-4) to be running 2GHz over twisted pair -it was generally accepted such signals were within the relm of coax.
Best video I’ve seen on cat 8. Crazy it’s 3 years old
Thanks for the feedback.
5:00 that is not specific to CAT8 though, you can get the exact same keystone for Cat 6 as well. It's what we have been using even since CAT6 became available. Entirely depends on the manufacturer of the keystone module.
Also I strongly advise against putting a plug on an "installation cable" (in Europe this is considered to be a botched job), these cables are meant to be terminated with a keystone module and then left alone inside your rack. Reason being the solid wires inside these cables break rather easily when bent/twisted/manipulated frequently and that leads to all sorts of "fun" connection issues.
Thanks for the input.
Do you have any examples of the advised method. A picture maybe?
Just keystones on both sides lol
With a patch panel in the rack
Sounds like the best future proofing is to also run blue ‘smurf’ tube everywhere so you can eventually pull the thinner, cheaper cable that will make Cat 8 obsolete - whatever THAT is.
I've only been retired five years and there are three new cable types. We weren't getting most requests for Cat.5E. Only a few Cat 6.
This is mostly customer generated as to cable type. Most of them have equipment they won't be replacing soon. If they were moving into a building that they're buying and doing major refurbishment I'd suggest going to the highest type emphasizing the cost of rewiring later at a higher cost. I talked a customer who was moving to wire his Unix system with unshielded twisted pair and adapters and patch panels so he could go to a PC system one day.He agreed but wasn't keen on it because his computer person said Unix would always be around.
Well, his building was struck by lightning and everything was destroyed. His computer guru said he couldn't replace it so he had to go to a Windows based network. Thats when my advice was appreciated. They just removed the UNIX system reversed the connections to the patch panels and Digi Boards and the network was running.
Wow. Thanks for the story and comment.
It was cat5 forever. I discovered cat6 in 2015. And we're on cat8 now? Good gosh
Thank you for the feedback. I appreciate it.
Cat 7 is not recognized by TIA/EIA and thus is NOT a standard in the United States. Cat 6 was ratified the same year Cat 7 was proposed and rejected. Cat 8 however is a recognized standard by TIA/EIA.
@@scythelord yep, 7 never became an official standard AFAIK. Cat 6A was ratified in 2009 if my memory is correct, and I'm pretty sure it's a TIA/EIA standard so it's industry supported as well. Cat 6A and 8 have their place and use, but IMO they are extremely specialized and very very few people need the performance and abilities these standards offer.
@@ChristopherGoggans I have no idea why anyone would want to deal with Cat7 or Cat8. They are a total pain to deal with and fiber is better in just about every way now.
I used to run £1m rollouts of hardware including LAN and internet, we discovered that making the cables by hand was inferior to factory machine made cables, and they lasted only about 2 years before the performance started to drop off. Once we started buying custom factory made cables we got far less LAN issues.
Thanks for the feedback!
Damn today I learned there is a Cat 8.
I'm still using Cat5e and 6 at my house, which is fine.
Things sure escalate quickly
Cat5e will still be fine for a long time, as long as you don't own a palace,10G family networking can totally run in short distance with cat5e.
Same, federal ISP i'ms working for still using 5e for apartments even for gigabit ethernet
Cat 5 was the latest tech when I did Cisco networking in high school and college and 5e came out shortly after. I wired my home with cat 5 and 5e and did a few small offices where I was doing build outs as I was a pro painter and did framing, drywall, and electrical....pretty much everything for typical commercial buildings. Things change fast and I have only had to do a few patch cables in the last 10 years or so.
There are more than 8 CATS outside my place. Maybe CATS 9-15.
Seeing the pricing you've found is very interesting! Here in Canada, the pricing I can find lines up with yours for cat6 and cat6a, but cat 7 doubles it and is much closer to the price of cat8 than cat6a!
Wow, that is steep. May not be as popular or available.
It would be helpful if towards the beginning of the video, you specified (labeled) which cable was what color. Blue = x, Yellow = y. I spent alot of time early in the video guessing which cable was which. Great information tho. Well explained.
Great point. Thanks
Me too
So which is which?
@@dvwjr79 yellow is cat8
@@angistron thank you
I´d use a pipe and go for the 6a so if in the future there is a need to upgrade this is pretty easy and you can do it where you really need it
Good idea if you can get some conduit to the location.
This guy is really into this reminds me of my teacher when he was showing us how to crimp these bad boys down
Thanks,
I did an install of 300 points 7 years ago. Did the same calculations and installed Cat 6. Most runs were under 30m. So still capable of 10G today. Pre terminated fibre is so cheap. So if you want to future proof install a run of fiber with cat 6 even if you don't use it. The only advantage of copper over fiber is POE. The other cool thing about fiber is you can haul a multi fibre cable and with one run have 24 or more pairs. Here in Australia it has the added benefit of almost having no installation requirements in S009. Whereas copper has seperation, weight and now power dissipation.
Thanks for the feedback.
Nice Video!
I am working as an electrician here in Austria and in my company we only install cat.7 cables and use tool-less cat.6a or 7 keystones.
If I recall correctly the bigger conductor size of cat.8 is because of the skin effect.
High frequency currents only travel on the surface of the conductor !
Sounds right as it is rated at a much higher frequency.
How is the frequency that gets used determined? Also, The cat 7 keystone is gg45 which requires an adaptor for rj45 no?
@@AlejandroTaylorEscribano The Frequency is tied to the transmission speed Higher Frequencies give you higher Bandwidth.
There are male and female , RJ45 keystones available
Female are the ones you use in special wall sockets that come empty so the keystones act as receptacles
A nice walk through and your conclusion is in line with what I feel atm.
For most soho installs I tend to go for Cat 6 or 6A as well.
Thanks for the feedback. Glad you like the video.
@@MikeFaucher hi sir please, if I get a linksys WiFi router + an Ethernet cable can I still connect my laptop ??
@@MikeFaucher and do I need to pay other monthly fees ?? Thanks
@@elfidel6755 Yes you can but I would use regular ethernet not this stuff.
@@MikeFaucher ok I wanna use it in my single room .. which one best can I get please ??
The only place I use Cat 8 is from my computer to my modem/router. The rest is 5e for the time being. May upgrade to 6e/7 in the future. Thanks for a very informative video for the masses.
What crazy router are you using that you see any difference between cat5e or anything else. Even regular Cat6 can pass 10Gb at short distances
Thanks for the comment.
@@kinghomer999 Not the router. I had Cat 8 on hand and used it. Plain and simple. I should not have to replace it for a long, long time...perhaps never.
If you need more than 10 G you just use fiber instead. You can have 40 or 100 G with cheap QSFP(+) modules. So just use cat 6a for copper connectivity, anything better is useless because, fiber.
that's kind of what i've been thinking about. a fusion splicer is NOT needed to terminate fiber OM3/OM4 if you get a kit or the right stuff, just make sure to measure twice and cut one and i guess you could just pull it on the wall along with 6A, 5e and RG6 if you wanted the full buffet.
@@cdoublejj You look around OM3 and OM4 can be manufactured to a specific length, its not even expensive to buy, in total spent less than £1000 to fiber the whole house (9 rooms plus 2 out rooms), 10 gig to every room (40 gig to office) All the cables made to measure, a switch "borrowed" from work job done.
I agree. Distance seems to be the problem here and they have yet to fix that with copper. Fiber it is.
Well actually for big data center you want to use copper as much as possible! Copper is always faster than fiber in short runs. Cat 8 support 40 and 100 Gig-E!
Since Fibers always introduce latency and the more you have fiber the more you introduce latency, in the end, it adds up.
But agree with you if you don't have hundreds of transactional server I would go with fiber.
Each datacenter have to go through an evaluation of its needs.
@@NMETSGChan yes short runs most definitely but it seems the critical runs lately are distance and further away from the data centers. I’m shocked they are not making copper runs greater for distance.
thanks for given practical knowledge is this very use full for me and other IT Persons very useful difference between cat 6 .cat7. and cat8....
Glad to hear that it helped and thanks for the feedback!
Thank you for the information. I'm not building a network, but the info will aid me in building a patch cable for RF equipment between a control head and base unit.
Glad it could help.
Just imagine terminating 100's of those, RIP fingers
Yep, that would hurt.
last week did 84 of cat 6A in a little office, you get used to it.
@@anttimaki8188 I install network cabling for a living and we like to use the Panduit Mini-com jacks, no punch-down tool required, and I find they are a lot faster on terminating and entire closet.
@@NehpetsNosliw I only do these occasionally, comes with electrician Job. I use whatever the boss has bought. Havnt seen punchdowns for a while though, mostly these clipping ones. Then theres those that got a tool that punch and cut all 8 wires simultaneosly. But If you only do these like every other month its kinda hard to sell the idea to boss :)
Just a job.. here in Russia we use only Cat 5. Speeds over 1G are only reachable with fiber-optic. Cat 6-8 are not acceptable because of money/speed proportion.
@ 2:34 in the video, a lot of the CAT6a i've bought in the past 2 or so years looks nearly if not exactly identical to that CAT7, so long as it's SFTP or FSTP aka fully shielded twisted pair.
You are right as they are almost identical except for a slightly larger conductor (most of the time).
@@MikeFaucher d seem exceeding spec is not issue, at least with some 6a which i think some is even 23 gauge. but, cat 7 REQUIRES these features. 8 seems to be a true upgrade. mostly best for data center. or equipped to deal with PoE++ which can push 75 watts of power minus overhead. EDIT: also 25gbit on 6a through 8 would be interesting to see
2x speed is perfect! Thx for the video
Glad it helped!
I only use field termination plugs, much better for shielding. The wires get unshielded at both ends if you use a typical RJ45, that’s were a lot of the interference will happen.
Thanks for you input!
When im doing the keystones and the final squeeze, i use a small notebook or like a pamphlet over the connector. Some thick paper and its much easier to squeeze the sucker all the way. Doesnt hurt your fingers that much either.
Great suggestion. Thanks.
Thank you Sir!
The time spend on your videos are totally worth it.
Thank you for the feedback. I appreciate it.
I'm interested in seeing the cost comparison between Cat7/Cat8 and fibre.
In our network, we don't even bother with copper anymore for 10Gbit links. Costs for fibre and SFP+ adapters have really made the market competitive.
Agreed. Any time I'm looking at greater than 1G, I look to fiber, or DAC for shorter links. 10G-T is too expensive, and uses far too much power; 'tho it is getting better. Also, maybe I'm just too old... I don't see any need for 10G+ to my laptop, desktop, TV, etc.
I would listen to this man explain how to watch paint dry. Great video!
Awesome! Thank you very much for the comment!
nice video, hopefully CAT7 and 10G ethernet is gonna start to become the norm more and more but i dont see yet how anyone will need 40G in their home network anytime soon.
Thanks for the feedback.
Agreed, but ive also never met someone that could fully saturate Cat6a even in the home, aside from a rare enterprise 10g or 2g bonded connection form the ISP, and in that case even the cable is installed by the ISP from the Modem to the Router. I have full fiber gigabit internet in a large overkill network in my home nd I still run Cat5e because no single appliance/end user will be saturating a full gigabit even... And I have servers, 4k cameras etc...
@@TheRickJames you're Rick James, Bitch :D
Cat7 is not needed for 10G. It only needs Cat6 or Cat6a depending on cable length. More than 55 meters needs 6A, and the vast majority of home network installations won't even come close to that.
Im doing Cat 6a regularly these days, its cheap and easy, and will be viable for a long time. Just pains me when i come back to panel and the user is using cheapest cat5 patches they can find to connect it all :D
It's been probably 20 years since I terminated any Cat 5 cables which were not really that hard. I'm glad I retired from the business, because I can't imagine the patience need to terminate these Cat 7 & 8 cables. Good grief. They must be 10 times as expensive as the old Cat 5 cables I used.
Cat 7 & 8 are extremely rare, it's easier (and cheaper) use fiber optics
Did my whole house up with that cat8 linkup cable earlier this year. Nice cable but those connectors were kind of a pain. I ended up scoring the jacket on the wires where the contacts meet them. This helped with make reliable connections more consistently.
Thanks for the feedback.
On my University we are still using old CAT 5 cables. Even in local PC store they have 5e and higher only, not 5 like in school :D
Damn that’s terrible 😢
and your university is called state uversity of telecommunications in Ukraine, Kyiv
lol
I’m reading on the product information page for bulk cat8 cable that most Ethernet ports on devices are not properly grounded. Do I need to ground the shielding somehow, or is it just overkill? Trying to search the Internet and not really getting a clear answer.
e.g. product B07JQ2GSFQ on Amazon. Down in the description it states : "Important Note
***Routers, switches and modems with proper RJ45 port grounding recommended. Unshielded devices can generate an "Antenna Effect" and can cause network bottle-necking when used with dual shielded wires.***”
Having grounded equipment or a shielding patch panel should be all that you need. You do not need a separate ground.
good video , you shuld also point out that for POE cat6a and above will preform better in terms of power lost
Only for POE+, even then you could see a significant voltage drop over certain distances. Especially in use with balanced wattage applications, a larger conductor will hurt at a certain point. I think Cat6a is actually the sweet spot for this as far as carrying power is concerned.
Hi, great video. I am just in the process of upgrading my home network. I have cat8 running to my outhouse office (25m run from router). I had to cut the Cat8 lead to fit through the hole in the wall. To join the cable back together i couldn’t find a Cat8 lead connector anywhere online, only Cat7. Would a Cat7 extension connector limit the Cat8 speed or am i best soldering the 2 cut ends back together ?
Thanks for the feedback. It is appreciated. I would not solder. Here are a couple that I have tried with no issues, and there are many others as well. amzn.to/44id9JS, amzn.to/3JRArOz assuming you are running 10G
Should I upgrade my 56k modem?
Maybe Apple makes some in really pretty colors, probably $300 on sale.
I would downgrade to 28.8, much more reliable. 😀
excellent video. thanks heaps!!!
Thank you. Glad you liked it. Appreciate the feedback.
I don't know why youtube decided that this should be in my recommended, but there is one thing I wonder and that is about the copper tape at 7:20. I know from personal experience that the adhesive side of aluminum tape is not conductive (I made a faraday cage inside a wooden box with alu tape). That is why I wonder if copper tape really makes contact with the ground wire or if the crimping from the locking boot is enough to push the glue away to make a firm connection to ground.
Valid concern however this copper tape and adhesive do work and I did verify with an ohm meter that both were conductive. Thanks for the comment.
Perfect video. thank you :)
Awesome. Glad you liked it.
Man, if you are running inside of walls, use the best cables available. The labor costs of changing it later (or retrofitting it now) are way higher than the incremental cost of the cables and parts.
Very true and good point.
I've installed "Cat 5e" CCA UTP cables about 8 years ago because it was cheapest. Now i'm replacing all of them with dual branded cat 6A U/FTP cable and shielded keystone modules everywhere, except for the IP cameras, those are Cat 5e FTP (Cu).
I remember arguing with someone about 2 years ago about cat 7 vs cat 8. I said "there is no cat 8, you must probably mean cat 7". I was wrong, so it seems?
Just add, don't take, your Cat5e will support VOIP, may be 7 wont?
Excellent video. Many thanks. Fully agree. 6a is the sweet spot as you can still use normal crimp RJ45 shielded termination. Cat 7 upwards just a pain! but I can see a use for datacentres.
For residential and business building to building or server to a comms I always run armoured optical pairs with 2 pairs redundant. Better performance, and more future proof than copper. Also price difference to Cat8 is negligible when all things considered.
Thanks for the feedback and the insight. It's appreciated.
Bro if I buy the lan cable for router connect to modem,is it will improve my speed router performance? I'm using also TIME 500 MBPS with wifi 6 router
Assuming you have 1GbE networking in your house and with that speed, you will not gain anything. This is mainly for 10GbE internal networking. Thanks for the question.
Mike great video I need you in the Bat Cave to update my equipment. You're Awesome.
Thank You. It would be fun to spend someone else money for a change.😀
I only have 1 ethernet cable in my home and it's a Flat Cat7 that goes from the modem to my pc (aorund 15meters). To connect my server room to my nework i have used an optic fiber cable (around 30 meters) and with it i don't have inteference problem and thick shields and thick cables.
Great. Thanks.
What about different Connectors like ARJ45 or TERA - I have not seen Network Switches with these sort of Connector Types so far - although I was told there are a few?
I don't think TERA will ever become popular, especially since the standard is already 17 years old and still not used.
The mian reason is compatibility.
On the other hand ARJ45 looks promising, but looking at how it works, it seems like that connector will require support from the switch on both sides to work,
and it will waste 4 wires in the cable, so I doubt it will happen.
To be hones I don't think any new standards will appear, since we are slowly getting to the point where fiber optic devices are getting affordable.
And the advantages of FO over copper are just too big.
I think copper network wires will disapear before we will get consumer available 1 Tb/s internet connections.
The standard for cat 6a cable is 23 awg. I see a lot of vendors sale cat 6a cabkes in 26 and 28 awg. How will smaller gauge conductor affect performance?
Typically the smaller wire is multi-strand wire an$ is what they use for patch cables. Very hard to work with if you crimp your own but multi strand allows you to use smaller wire and get the same performance.
19:25 where you got this info, that CAT7 is able to make 40GBit
I found this in various MFG specs. 7A is rated at 50M.
Thinking of buying Cat 6A, and I'm confused with not finding Ethernet Cat 6a in stores, only Patch Cat 6a, and there isn't anything mentioned in specs of the speed, would patch work the same like ethernet Cat 6a?
Either will work, patch or bulk. The only difference is that patch is usually thinner as it is multi strand wire and usually can't be easier cut and re-terminated. Otherwise the performance is the same. If you are looking for bulk, there is an amazon link in the video description where you can buy a bulk roll. Thanks for the question.
@@MikeFaucher I need 2 cables for PC, and PS4, both connected to router, and with shipping Cat 6a would cost me just 5 Euros cheaper then 2 Cat 8 cables from Wish, what would you suggest, is Cat 8 worth those 5 Euros then? Not so much of a difference in money, but in quality? Both are S/FTP
No not for 10GbE or less. Stick with 6a.
20:09 well you could use a hub/repeater or an industrial brand of an rj-45 amplifier.
Good point for length.
@@MikeFaucher Only bad thing is the amplifier doesn't just amplify the signal; it also amplifies noise too :/
And here I am happily running 10gige over old cat5, hand-crimped...with no issues. =)
I first use some cat 8 about 8 years ago, the termination were diabolicle
I am sure it was. Thanks for the feedback
Q can i use Cat6a KeyStone Jacks with CAT7 to arrive the 40GBit in CAT7 Cables OR is there any technical Reason why not?
Technically your can. I have no way to verify that as I am in the process of collecting some 40G hardware.
I was looking at patch cables today, and it seems that many companies are putting 26 AWG wire in their cat 6A patch cables, but using thicker wire in the cat 6 cable, which baffles me, because i often see like in your chart that you show 23 AWG wire for the 6A cabling. It seems like in patch cables, the more expensive 6a is using thinner wire!
Patch cables are mostly stranded wire and wall cables are solid.
This is great showcase of fact, that optic transmission is the future.
Which fact do you mean? It depends on the environment. For long distances optic transmission is better suited. But for an in-house installation Ethernet is better suited. Because if you use optical transmission, you still need an active(!) media converter to RJ45 (which needs electricity). Furthermore, Ethernet provides Power over Ethernet which is super convenient for Wifi access points or cameras or an interphone system. Last but not least, fibre cabling is very sensitive and less flexible with respect to the bending radius.
@@rohrbold see Bend Insensitive fiber optic cable.
@@richardj163 Thanks for the hint, wasn't aware of that.
I think actually the future is going to be wireless only for office and home use. They can get crazy speeds over short distances on the millimeter wave band. Speeds that a copper cable will never even approach. Optics will always cost a bit more due to the fact that rare earth metals are needed so it's wireless where cost is a concern. For industrial and data center applications fiber optics is the way to go.
@@YouCanHasAccount i just bought 90ft of fiber with the proper terminations for about half the cost of just a cat 7 cable. fiber is cheap as fuck.
I'd hate to do a whole wiring job with that stuff!
I have found CAT7 to be useful when on shortish runs where interference from other sources (video, electrical...) cannot be avoided.
Haven't worked with CAT8 yet.
Both remind me of shielded token ring wiring, as it was pretty good about making it through factories with lots of high voltage equipment without loss.
Yeah it would be a lot of work.
@@MikeFaucher So was token ring! That was even better than those giant cables for S/36. Don't miss that at all. Of course we couldn't plug everything into Ethernet then, let alone wi-fi. One worker might have had a twinax for a terminal, another for a printer, token ring for a PC and a phone line and a fax line.
Thanks for the video and your effort.
Does that mean that the flat ones sold on Amazon, with obviously a lot less shielding, are non-authentic?
Many of the patch cables use multi-stranded wire with is much thinner so the overall is much thinner. The bulk wire in this video uses thicker solid wire.
Im putting in cat 8 Northern Ireland is only gettting 1 gb for now but i can see it exploading in the future
Nice speeds. Good luck.
Folks, please don’t believe everything you see on Amazon. I work on both the US and global standards development organizations that develops all of the cabling category standards and I’m going to provide a few facts about the different categories of cables and their constructions/specifications.
UTP=no shielding at all.
F/UTP=unshielded pairs with an overall foil shield.
Sc/UTP=unshielded pairs with a screened (braided) shield.
F/FTP=shielded pairs with overall foil shielded.
Sc/FTP=shielded pairs with screened shield.
Cat5e through cat6 can be constructed with any of the above depending on the users requirements.
Cat7 and up must be Sc/FTP because of the extended frequency range. The shielded pairs mitigate internal crosstalk and the screen mitigates alien crosstalk between cables in a bundle.
Cat5e=100 MHz, 1Gb/s at 100m, any connector style.
Cat6= 250MHz, 1Gb/s at 100m, 10Gb/s at 55m, any connector style.
Cat6A= 500 MHz, 10Gb/s at 100m, any connector style.
Cat7= 600 MHz, 10Gb/s at 100m, only EC7, GG45 or TERA connectors (google them), RJ45 not supported.
CatA= 1000 MHz, 10Gb/s at 100m, 25Gb/s at 50m, only EC7, GG45 or TERA connectors, RJ45 not supported.
Cat8.1= 2000MHz, 10Gb/s at 100m, 40 Gb/s at 30m, any connector style.
Cat8.2=2000 MHz, 10Gb/s at 100m, only EC7, GG45 or TERA connectors, RJ45 not supported.
Multigig/NBaseT = 2.5Gb on cat 5e or better to 100m, 5Gb on Cat 6 or better at 100m, 10Gb on cat 6A or better to 100m. Depending on cable quality you might get 5Gb on cat 5e and 10Gb on cat 6, no guarantees.
So, the “cat 7” connectors you bought on Amazon are BS because as you see from the information above, cat 7 does not support RJ45 connectors. That’s a fact. So why can cat 8 be used on RJ45 in addition to the other connectors I mentioned? It political as most Standardisation is. The US (ANSI/TIA TR 42.7 committee) never adopted cat 7 or 7A because some companies refused to move away from theRJ45 for fear that users would not support a solution that was not backward compatible. The ISO/IEC SC25/WG3 committee did ratify 7/7A components. Terminated links are called Class F and Class FA respectively.
With Cat 8 we had the same concerns in the US so two grades were created, 8.1 and 8.2. The transmission specifications are identical but it much easier to achieve with the non-RJ45 connectors.
I hope this helps and I’m happy to discuss via comments or privately if anyone has questions.
Thanks for providing the extra detail.
@@MikeFaucher No problem!
Thanks for this info noted on this!
What is cat 6e?
Hey Mike, great video. I noticed that I can get Cat6 in shielded and non shielded, but Cat6a and 7 and 8 are all shielded. I assumed as you need higher frequencies you need shielding. Do you think if I go with Cat6 I need shielding in my house? Thanks!
Interference does become an issue at the faster speed. Thanks for the feedback.
we received new cat7 2m cables, and they are super thin and I have also seen flat cat7
Great to hear. Thanks for sharing the feedback.
Great informative video. Thanks.
Glad it was helpful! Thanks for the feedback.
So I have two cat 8 cables that are only 26AWG really weird but it works. I had to solder the leads to the Cat8 RJ45 clam shell connector since it’s so thin.
You have the multi-stranded wire which is designed for patch panels.
@@MikeFaucher ah okay, I have just have a 1 gb network rn was thinking abt building up a PFSense box with a 10 gb nic. You think I should opt for some 24 gage cat 8 or just stick with the patch
@@restrelax6282 Pfsense will not take advantage of anything over 1G. I would suggest putting 10G switches and 10G Nics for internal traffic to NAS or Media servers. For 10G you can CAT 6A or Cat 7 Patch and use 6A shielded for the in-wall stuff.
@@MikeFaucher ah okay, thanks for the help!
you've won my subscription
Awesome thank you.
I hope someone can give me some advise. I want to purchase cat 8 cables, but they have to be ran through a wall, so I would have to connect it to a wall plate. I can only find cat 6 wall plates on Amazon. If I used them, what would happen to the benefit of the cat 8 speed and so on?
I have links to all of it in the video description below the video in both videos. Cat 8 is very stiff when running through walls as it does not bend well. It can be done but it will be tougher. I would also consider using Cat 6A or 7 as it is much cheaper and a little easier to work with (th-cam.com/video/f2bILsfu8NM/w-d-xo.html). You will be able to get the 10GbE with 6A or 7.
For a majority of applications, just run 6a. It hits all the needs for most businesses, small, home, and enterprise. Inside the data center is a little different.
Aren't we starting to lose the cost benefit of copper over fiber with the increased copper mass of these cables? Even factoring in the cost of 10G SFPs it looks like a fiber would be cheaper for a 30 meter run.
Good point.
Cat 8 is supposed to be compatible with 40G over copper (I don't know if the standard is ratified, as I have not seen any RJ45-compatible hardware faster than 10G). That said, cost of fiber optic networks is decreasing. Even when you factor in cost of transceivers, that's rough to RJ45. You can run like 6 times more connections trough same space thanks to fiber being so slim. At this point I can see only one downside of fiber optics - if you need custom length you need some pretty expensive tools. For anything shorter than 10m you can go to copper DACs, which are usually on par with RJ45 cost wise. Then, on both SFP, QSFP and OSFP you can run 25, 40, 50 (now on SFP thanks to SFP56 standard), 100, 200, 400 and now 800 Gb. My company recently installed couple of 400G switches and seeing 400 to 8x SFP56 octopus breakout cable is wild.
I've never seen Cat8 deployed anywhere outside a research lab, but Cat 7 is kind of popular in high EMI machines as internal wiring and communication between different modules, where galvanic separation is not required.
So the cat 8 rj45 plug although expensive seem reusable unlike previous categories. Is that correct Mike?
They are reusable. The also make this type for 6a.
@@MikeFaucher ok, cool. Makes sense
Couple of questions:
do you think the connectors on aliexpress are really cat8.
And does it slow that much down that you cant get the rated speeds if you use real cat8 cable and cat6/6a connectors?
Do you know some make cables that are for sure cat7a+ / cat8? Because i think there are a lot of fake/outside specs cables.
And the last question, i cant find any stranded cat7a+ / cat8 cable, does that mean all are solid, so from wall socket to pc that needs to be also solid?
Thank you for the feedback. I appreciate it.
Great job; Thanks!! Sparks in Daytona
Thanks for the feedback. Appreciated it.
I could be way off but giving how long it took to make those Cat 7/8 terminations, wouldn't fiber with SFPs be a much better way to go? Even if you had to use a media converter for end user devices to connect between RJ45 and the LC2 wall jack?
That is always an option but once you get good at it, it’s not that bad. Also depends on your hardware. Many devices don’t support fiber. Great point.
Cat 8, when you need to run a drop through an 'always on' 70's microwave display.
I had to run a ethernet cables on the roof of a high power radio tower building, Cat 5E UTP couldn't work well and was trying to link up at 10mbps, but Cat 5e STP (shielded) worked fine at gigabit speeds, even at high 100MHz noise level. So to me cat 8 is for very specific uses at higher speeds, and I might as well use fiber at that point.
Informative video. Thank you so much!
If I terminate a CAT 7 cable, is it possible to attach to a CAT 8 keystone?
You should not have any issues doing that. Thanks.
Geez. Looking into how-to videos to run ethernet through attic to the kids rooms using cat 5.. Just stumbled on this video. Wow. Cat 7 and 8!
Which should I use just for basic internet to kids rooms?
Yeah. Thanks for the comment.
Definitely do not buy "Cat7" or Cat8 cables for any type of home situation. Quality Cat5e, Cat6 or Cat6A cable are more than enough to suit your needs. Any "Cat7" cable you buy off of Amazon is not a real Cat7 cable - They're just repackaged/rebranded Cat6/6A cables. Cat8 is only intended to be used in the Data Center at this point, and is rarely being used, anyways.
@@tubastud06 Thank you very much!
Thanks. Good video. Would your recommend Amazon’s cat 6 cables?
They should be fine. I would not hesitate.
Can you do a explainer of single pair Ethernet? I only found out about it recently which is rather embarrassing given that I pride myself as a rabid follower of networking news.
I will put it on my.
would you say that u/ftp cat6 would be similar to cat7? It looks the same, same outer braids with foiled individual twists. (twists about the same, unlike the tight cat8)
I agree. Thanks.
If I have CAT 7 through my house, is it worth replacing all my cables and switches to CAT 8? My ISP makes me use their router (I hate that), so I can't upgrade that (my previous ISP just gave me a cable modem and let me use my own router which was great!). Will I notice any speed increase?
No, I would definitely not upgrade if you have Cat 7. As a side note, almost every ISP router can be changed to a bridge allowing you to add your router. You just need to search TH-cam on the specific model/brand of router your ISP stuck you with to access the firmware on how to do it.
@@MikeFaucher Okay, thanks! I'll wait for CAT 9 to come out before I upgrade 😛
Which one should I get
Cat 6A
@@MikeFaucher thx
Well explained.
What is bets for home network ?
6A will get you to 10GbE
Q which Network card with RJ45 Connector you know who is able to make 40GBit with RJ45?
ATTO and Mellanox just to name a couple but there are others.
impressive details !
Thanks! Appreciate the feedback!
Here, in Eastern Europe I'm lucky to have a 1 Gbps connection. Most of the people has slower connection. I have put a 25 meter long Cat 6 cable in the wall. We will not have 40 Gbps anytime soon.
And we don't really need it anyway.
The cool thing about these things isn't just about download speeds, but file sharing among local area networks. Especially for youtube channels like Linus Tech Tips, where they use 8k video. A 40 Gbps connection would up their file sharing speed by 4x. Considering they're using 10 Gbps, and still maxing out the bandwidth on those connections.
@@Valentin119
yeah you'd be amazed just how annoying it is to be stuck on 1Gbps for local stuff once you get used to 10, 20, 40Gbps.
I have two servers that share large VM disk and and pass on the whole X session over ssh.
It would be a pain to manage them over 1Gbps, instead I bought some "old" HP 10Gbps dual port NICs from ebay and sat them up in aggregated mode to get the 20Gbps full duplex (or like the marketing would say 40Gbps) Before that I was actually facing the issue that the router would be the bottle neck and all the trafic would be caped at 500Mbps because it had to send 500Mbps up and down to each server making it "1Gbps" but not really.
Like Zorro I'm lucky to have 1Gbps internet, but I wish my ISP would give me access to 10Gbps, not just for blazing fast por.... "creative content" but for actually start to migrate some of my network over to local data centers around the city, as of right now it's just not worth spending money on external servers if I'd be limiting myself to 1Gbps.
it's fast for sure, but not really fast enough for really heavy data (as seen from Linux Tech Tips)... but then again it wouldn't be 30 dollars (299NOK) a month either :D
@@svampebob007 I'm only sitting at 275Mbps, it is plenty for my internet needs. My wife intends to do video editing, and doing youtube stuff for fun, and I want to create a mass storage server running a kind of raid variant. Not settled on which type to run yet. But something like these Cat 8 cables, or similar maybe 6a, is what I would like to speed of local data transfers to and from that mass storage. After I save up some money, I would eventually like to setup a mini home server, and network station, instead of needing to rely on my ISP's supplied cable modem.
@@Valentin119
TL;DR
I'd recommend you take a look at SFP instead of RJ45.
There's a lot of "old" discontinued server hardware on ebay that you can get for cheap. when I was looking at 10Gbps upgrade I saw the Asus 10Gbps Ethernet card and it cost 140USD for one single card, without cables included...
...........................................................
Buying something like:
2xHP NC523FP with two 3M DAC (cable) = 85aus each so around 121USD for the whole thing that can do 20Gbps up and down. that's what I got and the only downside that it's only 3 meters cable (max 5M on DAC)... but both servers are located 2µm from each other :P
I'm considering building an outside storage box for the servers (kinda like they did on Linus Tech Tips with their outside water loop)
You can then go with fiber you can still get the NC523 or a similar dual 10Gbps NIC (some even go up to dual 40Gbps for cheap) and for connectivity you'll need the HP Blade System c-Class 10Gb (16USD) adapter and 30M Outdoor Field Fiber Patch Cord (56USD)
The downside is that the adapters are kinda specific so you'll need to check the compatibility, and the cables are on the price of cat7-cat8 for 30M but those outdoor fiber patch cord come with a metal shield so it's easier to not break the fiber glass, you can go all the way up to 100M with fiber... but then it get's really freaking expensive for the adapters and quality cables... I trust eBay to sell medium range products, but if I was to spend more money I would be cautious about the actual quality of those fibers anything bellow 30M is pretty standard.
Anyway good luck on your future project, relying on the ISP do give you a decent modem is the stupidest thing we do before investing in a good home network :)
@@svampebob007 Thanks for all the information! I'll have to keep that in mind!
I am still in the process of obtaining all my certifications, currently working on my Networking from cisco and Comptia, so I am learning a whole bunch of stuff I never even knew about, glad I put off the project now, seeming that I definitely have more knowledge than I did back then, definitely would've done it wrong without knowing what I do now!
Important for non-US applications: Use the A Position. The B Position is mostly only in the US
Depends on where in europe, in norway we use B
A vs B is literally just aesthetics. the electricity doesn't care which wire it uses for transmit and receive so long as both sides of the cable are the same. you can do 50% A runs and 50% B runs in the exact same site install and it will work just fine because the whole A and B thing was never real we just made it up.
You can make up your own color code as long as it's consistent it'll work
How is the frequency determined? Does the switch chose?
Mainly your device and switch determine the speed. Cabling insures quality of signal if you are running longer distances.
@@MikeFaucherI guess what I mean is if I run a Cat 7 able but terminate with say RJ45 from 6a from a unify switch to a unify AP then how is the frequency of the signal running through the cable set? By the switch? If so, how does it know the max is 500Mhz vs 1000Mhz vs 2000Mhz assuming the switch is capable of all of these?
@@AlejandroTaylorEscribano The frequency of a cable is a max rating and is not set anywhere. What you are describing should work fine. Cable speed does not really come into play till you get to 10GbE speeds or higher.
Whats the difference between A config and B config?
The only real difference between these two are the green and orange pairs for backward compatibility with older phone systems. Most patch cables that are bought today are "B" and this is the standard for the US, however in Europe I believe they mostly use "A". As long as it is uniform in your network, it really does not matter but most new installs are using "B".
for grounding do both sides need to be metal?
No, one should be sufficient.
@@MikeFaucher that's what I figured thank you. Can you recommend where to buy ethernet cable (cat6a or 7), plugs, etc?
Cat 8 will be mandatory with the upcoming docsis 4.0 due to frequency
Thanks. Look forward to 4.0.
@@MikeFaucher do you know the coaxial cable specs that are required for docsis 4.0 ? im guessing we also need to change the cable due to frequency increase to 1.8ghz in docsis 4.0
@@LivingTheDream77 No. have not researched it yet.
I read that Cat 7 is 1000 Hz frequency but is limited to 600 Hz if you go with a RJ45 connector.
Please see my recent comment where I list all of the frequency and connectors allowed for each category.
They could have added a screw-on instead of the ziptie to make it "nicer". I don't think the length would have matter anyway.
Do you have standards for the connectors or at the standards just describing the cable? I mean - can you buy a certified RJ45 connector for lets say a Cat 8 cable?
You typically buy a connector that matches or is compatible with the cable you are using.
In a small home, a Cat6 will be just as good as a Cat7 or Cat8. Here in Norway we all just skip the Cat7 all together, and we use mostly Cat6 in all kind of buildings. Sometimes we use Cat8 in bigger businesses, but rarely. I should also add that Cat7 and Cat8 is very close in price now in late 2022, and both is almost twice the price of Cat6
You are right, cat 6 is fine for shorter runs. Thanks for the feedback
CAT9 will be just a stiff rod of copper.
We will start to come full circle and hit Thinnet and finishing with Thicknet cabling. :) I have pulled all, and literally pulled on thinnet attached to Cat5 for ceiling run replacement, lol.
Cat8 is almost silly, its obsolete to fiber in price, distance and speed. Perhaps more practical for just patching since in that use case it would be quicker to install than splicing fiber. That being said for the utter majority of homes, small and medium business in the world that kind of available bandwidth for most of the runs they have would never be saturated. Or by the time it has a real practical use case it would have already been superseded by another available technology. Ive been installing for over a decade(Since 10bt token ring hubs etc) and I still recommend Cat5e for the majority of people, cat 6a for some of the backbone/CPE runs. Especially in residential applications its completely pointless.
Certainly agree that CAT 8 is a bit of waste, but there many out there including me that run 10G networks that need 6a or 7 for the longer runs. Thanks for the input.
@@TheRickJames Here where i live all new buildings has to have a fiber and Cat6 installed. Fiber is not usually used, the isp´s are using a fiber router and use the cat6's to split the internet to houses. But you CAN buy a fiber link if you really want to, The ISP will just use 2 fiber-Cat6 couplers one on the panel side, and one in house. its funny when i see it.
@@MikeFaucher why not just fiber? its a hell of a lot cheaper to run and length is basically not a issue.
What happens with running cat 8 cable but cat 6a rj45 wall plates?
Result to Cat 6a output. You would need a complete Cat 8 connection from host to router/switch to support the full 40Gbps speed. Otherwise I believe you would max out at the 10Gbps output.
As long as one side is grounded.
Cat8 has a very large bend radius and is not suited for wall mounted installs. It's bend radius is like 8 inches.
@@discodench The cable I am using is a little better than 8 inches but you are right, it is pretty thick and very stiff. If you are going to run it into a wall you can use an external junction box to allow for the bend but still a challenge.
Great job ! Thanks !
Thanks for the feedback.
Excellent price and comprehensive comparison. My only complaint is that you didn't include the cost of any terminators/keystone connectors because I assume those are more expensive than the cable. EDIT: Yes you did
Thanks for the feedback.