G'day
My office has finally been connected to NBN, however still using cat 5 cabling.
Are there any benefits to getting a plan > 100mbps down or is it pointless without upgrading the cabling?
Any Benefit for High Speed nbn if Still Using Cat5?
LKouki on 14/06/2023 - 15:56
Comments
its a TP-link vr600. I think the router is getting the full speed from the NTD as i can get 500mbps on my phone but workstation only around 95
The other limitation could be the motherboard/network card. How old is the "workstation" and do you know what motherboard it has? If it is capable of 1gbps, try updating your drivers.
Your business do you mean by your office? The cost difference for a business is negligible. Your turnover might like what 200k a month at the very least or whatever, so worrying about saving $30 a month on internet seems silly. Would update the cabling and networking hardware. Each minute each employee is waiting on the internet for something is costing you money, and the stress of a slow internet with all your staff sharing a 100mbps connection could affect morale. Every time you deal with a business and the worker sighs that their network/computer is slow today you get the impression they just don't care, you hear in their tone of voice "this place is (profanity)".
Cat 5 cabling can do 10GBps, depends on how old it is, if it was from the days of twisted pair you will have to upgrade your cabling.
yeah not 100% sure, at least 15 years as that's when i moved in but cant remember if the cables were new etc
CAT 5 is not rated at 10GBS. CAT 6 and 7 are from memory.
I think CAT 5 can go up to 2.5GB, but I could be wrong.According to this page - https://community.fs.com/blog/quick-view-ethernet-cables-cat…
Cat 5 is up to 100Mbps to 100m (gigabit is possible, but not guaranteed)
Cat 5e is up to 1000Mbps to 100m
Cat 6 is up to 10Gbps to 30-50m or 1Gbps to 100m
Cat 6a is up to 10Gbps to 100m (better shielding allows longer runs)
Class 7 is up to 10Gbps to 100m, 40Gbps to 50m, 100Gbps to 15m.
What really matters is how many pairs in your cable, if it's 4 pairs/8 wires it'll work at gigabit speed on distances up to 40-50m.
Depends on your router.
My office has finally been connected to NBN, however still using cat 5 cabling.
You probably have Cat 5E which has been around for decades, good for gig connections. 5 is another standard and slower. I have not seen Cat 5 for… longer than I can remember.
Are there any benefits to getting a plan > 100mbps down or is it pointless without upgrading the cabling?
How long is a piece of string?
It really depends on how many people are at the office and what they are doing. No info = no useful advice.
time to rewire your house
My office has finally been connected to NBN, however still using cat 5 cabling.
I don't even know what you are saying here
Are there any benefits to getting a plan > 100mbps down or is it pointless without upgrading the cabling?
Cat5 or cat5e? The later will do 1gbps.
The real question is, do you need FASTER internet?
Sounds like op has a 100MBs switch/router somewhere and it is limiting the bandwith to 100MBs.
Check out the network equipment between the router and your PC to see what it is and how fast it is.
1GBS switches with 5 or 8 ports are only about $30 or $40. The price goes up allot for a 16 port.
I'd say yes, CAT5 max speed is 100mbps but that is per CAT5 line.
If you get >100mbps then from the NBN modem to your router you should use at least a CAT6 cable and then you could feed into various CAT5 cables. Sure none of those will utilize the extra speed but say you get a 1gbps connection and you have 10X CAT5 connections off your router then all of those will be able to use the max speed of each line rather than be bottlenecked by having only a 100mbps main connection be split 10 ways.
Also you could connect via WiFi and utilize faster speeds that way rather than use the old existing CAT5 cables.
Depends, check if your router is able to obtain 1GBps connection to the NBN NTD as its possible on Cat5/Cat5e (short runs etc…)