Cat 5, Cat 5a, or Cat 6 patch cable

Between the 3, which one should be used for a home network connection? I have a D-Link WBR-1310 Wireless router (Link) Not the fanciest router but it gets the job done.

I am resorting to a wired connection because I have recently moved and now my wireless connection keeps dieing on me when the cordless phone rings. It didn't do this when I lived at the old house.

I'll need between 75-100 ft of cable to go from the router to the computer in the other room. Probably less (25-60 ft) but I want to make sure that I have enough.

I am asking about the 3 different cable types because I never heard of the cat 5a and cat 6 cables until I went shopping online today. I didn't want to purchase the cat 6 cable (which from what I can tell is the future of networking) if it will not work with the equipment that I have on hand.

Also, will there be anyway to kill the wireless aspect of the router so that outsiders can't access the network? Or will I have to hope that the encryption that I have set up will work?

 

First, this should go into support I think.

Cat 6 is for, as far as I remember, the ultra-high speed shit. Gb/s lines instead of Mb or KB/s.

And I think your mistaking 5a for 5e. I've never heard of Cat 5a. o.o

But, to answer the question, I doubt you'd get much of a difference between 5 or 6, since a standard home system would never really use Cat6 cables to their potential.

If you can find them cheap, you could probably use a cat6, but Cat5 would be fine.

as far as the wireless question, once you have it up and working, you can configure it to use a pass to connect, or turn it off entirely in the case of some routers.

 

Instead of leaving the wireless, I just recommend changing your wireless channel to one that doesn't interfere with the phone.

Either that or get a 5.8 Ghz phone and clear the 2.4 Ghz frequency for WiFi.

If you really want to go wired, any Cat 5 cable will do the job as long as its under 384 feet, I think.

Yes, you can disable WiFi. I don't recommend abandoning it though - just change the frequency as I said to get into a clearer channel and possibly turn off frequency hopping on your phone if it does that.

If you want to keep the radio on but make it secure, turn on WPA or WPA2 and/or hide the SSID.

 

Hmm... wasn't sure which place to post in. Thought that support was just for site only problems.

Thanks for the responses. Figured that there wasn't much of a difference between the cables.

I think that I will go with the wired connection. Even before we had the phone, the wireless connection was as weak as a kitten. Think is has something to do with some of the metal that was used to build the house. Also, trying to play MMO's can be a bitch with an unstable connection.

 

Make sure you have a filter each device hooked up to your phone lines when using DSL services. The act of the phone rining itself can knock out your net by itself, it may not just be to wireless frequency.

Cat6 is compatible with cat5 and cat5e so it really doesn't matter. Find out what speed the ethernet is running at out of the router you have there and match it with the appripriate cable.

Cat6 will generally give better results over cat5e due to the frequency it uses but the difference isn't noticable unless you are using gigabit ethernet supported by both router and network card and cat6 patch cables.

 

I'd go with either Cat5 or 5e. Honestly, in a home network, you're probably not going to see that much difference.

Are you buying the cable? I always just but the little clips and the cable separately. Arrange the wires the way they need to be and clamp the clip on it. You have to dish out a little money for the tools, but I've saved so much money on cables because instead of buying a new cable if I ruin it, I'll just cut off the ruined end and put a new clip on it.

 

It is a well known fact that catX cable is damn expensive to buy fully made and crazily cheap to make yourself. Profit levels in cable are massive.

 

Yeah, but you'd be surprised how many people I know that just buy it fully made. They think that making the cable is some super complicated thing when it's actually pretty simple.

 

Yes, it is rather simple. An old roomate of mine did it himself more than once. And I'd rather use wired internet versus wireless anyway. Wireless sucks complete ass.