Ethernet. Burn?

[David Hess]

Installing CAT6 or CAT6a is not much more expensive than CAT5e and leaves open the possibility of 2.5GBASE-T, 5GBASE-T, and 10GBASE-T.  I find 1000BASE-T (Gigabit Ethernet) rather limiting at this point.

However 10GBASE-T hardware, except for the CAT6 or CAT6a cable, is still expensive, and 2.5GBASE-T and 5GBASE-T hardware is not commonly available.  There are some relatively inexpensive 2.5GBASE-T and 5GBASE-T NICs and USB3 adapters which might be useful, but the USB3 adapters have a tendency to overheat.

For applications where shorter range, like within a room, is acceptable, SFP+ is less expensive, and long range SFP+ using fiber is a possibility.

[Whales]

Practical tips for running CAT ethernet:

1. The wallplates are often used with "keystones".  In my country (Australia) you can get keystones that fit into the exact same plastic parts as light switches ("wall plates"), but this varies depending on your area.

I can never remember the word "keystone", instead I end up searching catalogs & the web for "tombstone" all the time and end up very confused.


2. If you choose CAT5e cable then only use CAT5e keystones and CAT5e crimps.  Similar for CAT6 cable: use only CAT6 keystones and CAT6 crimps.

If you use the wrong type then they can be very hard to punch/crimp and (in my experience) are mechanically unreliable afterwards.  Note that CAT5e and CAT6 keystones & crimps look very similar.  Each CAT standard has different wire thicknesses.


3. Don't use cheap greymarket (ie eBay) crimps and keystones if you can avoid them.  They are much harder to get reliably punched/crimped, even though they look exactly like more expensive units.  The differences are tiny but matter a lot.  I leaned this the hard way (it was _very_ confusing until I worked out the differences like pin thickness) and some of my cheap crimps are now corroding (very bad gold plating).


4. Cheap plastic punchdown tools (no moving parts) work fine for doing a few keystones.  They're a bit fiddly but they're OK (and much better than trying to improvise with flat-bladed screwdrivers and pliers).  One of these should cost almost nothing.


5. Your country may have some laws & practices regarding data cabling.  In Australia anything that's "in a wall cavity" technically requires a registered cabler (IIRC from reading the relevant laws a while back).  YMMV.


6. As others have mentioned: beware Mb vs MB and Gb vs GB.  Maximum actual throughput on a 1Gb ethernet link varies from approximately 800ish to 900ish Mbit/s depending on the brand & design of network card.

In my country: almost no household internet connections are above 100Mb/s and almost all home routers can't even hit 100Mb/s except under very specific circumstances (hardware offloaded NAT with no special rules).  I regularly saturate my gigabit LAN when doings tranfers between my PCs, however.


7. Testing your work is easy: connect a computer at each end and they will tell you the maximum speed they managed to negotiate (eg 1000Mbit/s or 100Mbit/s).  If you are getting 100 instead of 1000 then you have probably miss-crimped a wire/pair or two.

[madires]

Installing CAT6 or CAT6a is not much more expensive than CAT5e and leaves open the possibility of 2.5GBASE-T, 5GBASE-T, and 10GBASE-T.

... as CAT5e does, just with shorter cable runs.

[madires]

In my country: almost no household internet connections are above 100Mb/s and almost all home routers can't even hit 100Mb/s except under very specific circumstances (hardware offloaded NAT with no special rules).

The older inexpensive TP-Link routers with a single core CPU running at roughly 600MHz do 250 - 300Mbit/s NAT with OpenWrt and even more with the original firmware supporting the SoC's hardware NAT. If a router doesn't even exceed 100Mbit/s NAT is must be a very cheap and/or quite old one.

[PerranOak]

... so, ALL network cards, once "ethernetted" will operate to at least my ISP download limit of 500Mbps?

[madires]

... when they are 1000BASE-T, the LAN ports of your router too, and the router is able to handle 500Mbit/s.

[PerranOak]

Ah. So, they said I could go up to 900Mbps (if I pay!) so it couldn’t handle that?

[fordem]

Installing CAT6 or CAT6a is not much more expensive than CAT5e and leaves open the possibility of 2.5GBASE-T, 5GBASE-T, and 10GBASE-T.  I find 1000BASE-T (Gigabit Ethernet) rather limiting at this point.

I can't help but be curious as to what you're doing that you find GbE to be the limiting factor.

In my experience, a shift from 10/100 to GbE does not provide a significant improvement for common office tasks - several years back one of my clients was moving to a new location and we took the opportunity to upgrade the LAN infrastructure, from the existing 10/100 to GbE - all that was changed was the cabling & switches - the existing servers and some of the desktops had GbE, other desktops were 10/100 - we timed the opening of the client-server application, the reduction in wait time was less than five seconds, reduction in opening time for MS Word or Excel documents from a shared folder was not measurable.

I have no doubt that there are specific tasks that might see a worthwhile improvement, engineering, architecture, graphic design, but, how many users are likely to be running those tasks in a home environment?

That was my first GbE installation and between then & now, I've done many more, large & small, banks & retail businesses - I've not yet seen a reason to go faster than 1 Gbe to any client station.  I have, on larger installations, run 2x1 GbE LAGs between switch closets, more out of an abundance of caution, because we're not passing enough traffic on the LAG to saturate one of the links, one installation, where we have OLTP data, VoIP & IP surveillance was actually configured with 4x1 GbE links, designed to be run as two separate LAGs, just in case, turned out why we didn't need it.

[james_s]

I have some older laptops where the bottleneck is the PCI bus or the hard drive. My more modern systems really do transfer close to and occasionally above 100MB/s over the gigabit network. It's about twice as fast as the fastest I've ever seen from WiFi.

[Whales]

Ah. So, they said I could go up to 900Mbps (if I pay!) so it couldn’t handle that?

My numbers are approximate, YMMV.  Test before throwing money at them.  Also beware the overheads of UDP/TCP and the various ATM/PPPoE/etc framing strategies that different ISPs use.

Sidenote: buffer controls are worth reading up on too.

In my experience, a shift from 10/100 to GbE does not provide a significant improvement for common office tasks [...] I have no doubt that there are specific tasks that might see a worthwhile improvement, engineering, architecture, graphic design, but, how many users are likely to be running those tasks in a home environment?

Backups are the big one for me.  Eg 40 gigabytes takes 6ish minutes instead of an hour.  (If it's easier then you're more likely to do it)

[madires]

Ah. So, they said I could go up to 900Mbps (if I pay!) so it couldn’t handle that?

The important point is that your router is able to handle the traffic throughput (Internet traffic incl. NAT and firewall). If you have 1Gbit/s Internet access and Gigabit Ethernet in your LAN then your PC is able to use the maximum throughput of your Internet access. If your LAN is only Fast Ethernet then your PC can download files with 100Mbit/s (minus overhead) at maximum, but another 9 PCs could do that too at the same time.

[David Hess]

... when they are 1000BASE-T, the LAN ports of your router too, and the router is able to handle 500Mbit/s.

Just to be clear, "routing" includes traffic between the LAN and WAN ports.  If you have several computers connected to the LAN ports on a router, then their traffic between themselves is actually through a switch and not the router part of the router and should only be limited by the speed of the Ethernet connections and the computers themselves.

Traffic which must be routed between the WAN and LAN ports is usually limited by the processing performance of the router.  My old FreeBSD based router on a 500 MHz Pentium 2 could barely route between ports at 100 Mb/s.  My old Linksys routers could only handle about 30 Mb/s between the WAN and LAN ports.

Installing CAT6 or CAT6a is not much more expensive than CAT5e and leaves open the possibility of 2.5GBASE-T, 5GBASE-T, and 10GBASE-T.  I find 1000BASE-T (Gigabit Ethernet) rather limiting at this point.

I can't help but be curious as to what you're doing that you find GbE to be the limiting factor.

Bulk file transfers between systems now completely saturate my Gigabit Ethernet and impact the performance of any other traffic over that network including much slower internet traffic and local Remote Desktop Protocol traffic.  Some of my systems are multi-homed with separate network connections to a secure local only network and a private network with access to the internet.  For them with bulk transfers over the secure local only network, traffic on the other interface is not affected.

In my experience, a shift from 10/100 to GbE does not provide a significant improvement for common office tasks - several years back one of my clients was moving to a new location and we took the opportunity to upgrade the LAN infrastructure, from the existing 10/100 to GbE - all that was changed was the cabling & switches - the existing servers and some of the desktops had GbE, other desktops were 10/100 - we timed the opening of the client-server application, the reduction in wait time was less than five seconds, reduction in opening time for MS Word or Excel documents from a shared folder was not measurable.

It makes a big difference for bulk file transfers and I have also noticed a significant improvement in the performance of Remote Desktop Protocol.  With Gigabit Ethernet, I can play video on a remote system without it being apparent that access is through RDP.  Before with 100Mb/s Ethernet, the video would tear or stutter.

That was my first GbE installation and between then & now, I've done many more, large & small, banks & retail businesses - I've not yet seen a reason to go faster than 1 Gbe to any client station.  I have, on larger installations, run 2x1 GbE LAGs between switch closets, more out of an abundance of caution, because we're not passing enough traffic on the LAG to saturate one of the links, one installation, where we have OLTP data, VoIP & IP surveillance was actually configured with 4x1 GbE links, designed to be run as two separate LAGs, just in case, turned out why we didn't need it.

Up until recently I used 100 Mbit/second Ethernet on my internet accessing network and Gigabit Ethernet on my secure local network for file transfers.  Both networks are updated now to Gigabit Ethernet but I am looking into how to upgrade my secure local network to something faster.

[james_s]

Ah. So, they said I could go up to 900Mbps (if I pay!) so it couldn’t handle that?

Gigabit ethernet will obviously handle 900Mbps internet service. In most cases the bottleneck will be your router. I have gigabit fiber to my house and even one of the faster consumer routers I could find needs to have whatever they call their acceleration feature enabled and even then it can "only" push 800-900Mbps which is measurably slower than a direct connection from the ONT to my PC. Many older routers top out at 100-200Mbps.

[james_s]

In my experience, a shift from 10/100 to GbE does not provide a significant improvement for common office tasks - several years back one of my clients was moving to a new location and we took the opportunity to upgrade the LAN infrastructure, from the existing 10/100 to GbE - all that was changed was the cabling & switches - the existing servers and some of the desktops had GbE, other desktops were 10/100 - we timed the opening of the client-server application, the reduction in wait time was less than five seconds, reduction in opening time for MS Word or Excel documents from a shared folder was not measurable.

I upgraded my home network from 100Mbps to gigabit several years ago because 100Mb was becoming woefully inadequate. Transfering a 8GB HD movie from my workstation to my media server would take ages, backing up a 8TB drive over the network would take weeks, even over gigabit it takes days, the limiting factor mostly being speed of the backup drive. If you have a link that feeds a switch connecting multiple clients it's even easier to saturate that uplink. It's very common these days for consumers and prosumers to be transferring many gigs of media files around, backing up workstations to NAS, and other data intensive operations. Now with gigabit internet becoming fairly common and video streaming becoming the normal way to watch TV and movies at home it's very easy to saturate a 100Mb connection.

I too upgraded simply by replacing my switches. I regularly hear people saying you need cat6 for gigabit but for the typical cable lengths found in a home or small office that just isn't true. If I were putting in runs that are hundreds of meters long I'd make sure to use cable that was up to spec but for home use I've never had an issue. I even have a few runs that are over ancient cat5 that was installed 15 years ago, not even e, I get reliable gigabit transfers over them.

[David Hess]

I regularly get 100 MB/s or close each way simultaneously on my 1 Gb/s wired Ethernet network with a variety of adapters.

I just found out why I sometimes get 110 MB/s on my 1 Gb/s network.  For a couple of years Windows has supported "multichannel" with SMB 3.0 which automagically uses more than one network link if available, which in my case included my 100 Mb/s network, so I was getting the combined speed of my separate 1 Gb/s network and 100 Mb/s network when doing file transfers.  Up until now I thought the 110 MB/s measurement was in error but it was not.

I only noticed now after finishing upgrading my 100Mb/s network to 1 Gb/s and getting file transfers of 200 MB/s which is plainly impossible on a 1 Gb/s network.  I also noticed that both network adapters, one of which is connected through USB 3.0, were showing approximately the same traffic, which at first lead me to think something was broken.

[Monkeh]

I regularly get 100 MB/s or close each way simultaneously on my 1 Gb/s wired Ethernet network with a variety of adapters.

I just found out why I sometimes get 110 MB/s on my 1 Gb/s network.  For a couple of years Windows has supported "multichannel" with SMB 3.0 which automagically uses more than one network link if available, which in my case included my 100 Mb/s network, so I was getting the combined speed of my separate 1 Gb/s network and 100 Mb/s network when doing file transfers.  Up until now I thought the 110 MB/s measurement was in error but it was not.

I only noticed now after finishing upgrading my 100Mb/s network to 1 Gb/s and getting file transfers of 200 MB/s which is plainly impossible on a 1 Gb/s network.  I also noticed that both network adapters, one of which is connected through USB 3.0, were showing approximately the same traffic, which at first lead me to think something was broken.

We'll just gloss over the fact that 1Gbps = 119.2MiB/s..

[David Hess]

I regularly get 100 MB/s or close each way simultaneously on my 1 Gb/s wired Ethernet network with a variety of adapters.

I just found out why I sometimes get 110 MB/s on my 1 Gb/s network.  For a couple of years Windows has supported "multichannel" with SMB 3.0 which automagically uses more than one network link if available, which in my case included my 100 Mb/s network, so I was getting the combined speed of my separate 1 Gb/s network and 100 Mb/s network when doing file transfers.  Up until now I thought the 110 MB/s measurement was in error but it was not.

I only noticed now after finishing upgrading my 100Mb/s network to 1 Gb/s and getting file transfers of 200 MB/s which is plainly impossible on a 1 Gb/s network.  I also noticed that both network adapters, one of which is connected through USB 3.0, were showing approximately the same traffic, which at first lead me to think something was broken.

We'll just gloss over the fact that 1Gbps = 119.2MiB/s..

The MII interface is 8 bits operating at 125 MHz so the data rate really is 1 Gb/s.  The line rate using 4 channels of 5 level encoding at 125 MHz is 1,160,964,047.44 bits per second.