Upgrade CAT5 cable?

[feelyat]

I have lived in my house for 20 years. When I first moved here, I went through the effort to run (then current) Cat5 cables in various strategic locations throughout the house. Since then, especially as we did renovations, added a home office, etc, more locations were put in place, but newer runs (still >10 years old) are using Cat5e rated cable. Even my patch panel is Cat5, not 5e. At this time, I have endpoints in all rooms, plus three ceiling-mounted wifi APs, all using POE over Gigabit Ethernet.

It occurs to me that those old Cat5 runs could be pushing data at rates beyond what they were designed for. I know that the differences between Cat5 and 5e are subtle, so maybe I should just not worry about it, but I wonder if I'm setting myself up for trouble, and if I would be better served to upgrade the wiring. How would I even identify marginal cabling? Most of the runs are relatively short (<50ft), if that makes a difference.

Would it ever make sense to upgrade my home network to Cat6A?

 

[ColinTaylor]

The original Cat5 cables were good enough for gigabit data over short/medium distances assuming they were of reasonable quality. Cable lengths of 100 metres (330 ft) would be pushing your luck though.

So normally I say not to worry about it. If you start to see errors on a particular cable run then replace it, otherwise leave it alone. Who knows, by the time you have "an actual problem" you might want replace it with fibre, or Cat9+++, or whatever.

That said, I think there's one thing to consider and that's your use of PoE. I'm not a PoE expert so have a look at this and this. Even though Cat5 can do PoE, if you're planning on sending a lot of power over long cable runs it might be worth investing in Cat6A just to cut down on the heat being generated.

 

[feelyat]

My current use of POE is limited to relatively low power devices (802.3af, ~12W each), and none of my runs are more than 45 feet or so (15m).

I haven’t seen any Ethernet errors, ever, on the current network. Sounds like no action is the best action.

 

[Greg72]

Cat 5e will handle 10gbps in a home network setup. It is only if you are seeing error rates going up or only able to do 100mbps, would I even consider running replacement cables.