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Cable Wars: Cat 6 vs Cat 7 vs. Cat 5e?
stone22 asks: "My company has decided to install a gigabit link. This will be initially used only for testing purposes, and on the longterm as a backbone for our corperate network. We allready decided to use copper, but what standard ? I've heard about problems using cat 7 cables (cross talk, bulky cables, non-standard connectors) so I could really use some hints from all you cabling experts out there."
I design and test the physical side of ethernet for a living, so I think I state with all honesty and some authority that using anything more than cat-5 cable is wasting money. Kinda like buying 94 octane when your car is designed for and runs fine on 87. It has more capacity than you will ever use. Ok, true cat-5 cable may be hard to find, so when I'm saying cat-5, I'm also mean cat5e. I agree with the other posters that fiber is the way to go for a backbone, but copper is quite a bit cheaper, and pretty reasonably priced. According to the Ethernet spec, fiber is actually held to a higher standard in terms of bit-error rate (fiber is 10^-12, where copper gigabit is 10^-10- I'm pretty sure, I have them in spreadsheets to check against, but anyway, fiber is better) On the other hand, on the interfaces I've tested, the BER on maximum loss (copper) cable is usually far better than 10^-10 so that isn't much to worry about.
Be careful if you are thinking about installing fiber for possible use for 10GbE- there are a bunch of standards, and most of them seem to be incompatible with most current types of fiber, such as requirinig very small diameter single-mode fiber. At the moment the 10GbE world appears to be dominated by the long haul guys, not the LAN manufacturers, so cheap connectorization/fiber is not necessarily high on their priority list.
Remember to keep the length under 100m (as it says in the spec) and don't go through a lot of patch panels (since each connector adds loss). If you are going for maximum length, be very careful how you cut and crimp the cable- the more you can maintain the twist in the wire the better, and the more matched each wire in the pair is, the better.
Interesting fact: Since the loss of cat-5 cable is not well defined per unit length, The test cables (for 100Base-TX) are not specified in terms of length, they are specified in terms of loss. The maximum length cable that you test to is not a 100m cable, it is a 10dB loss at 16MHz cable. With good quality (cat5e) cable, that works out to around 135m.