On Wed, 2002-06-12 at 20:23, Wayne Johnson wrote: > There is two classes of wire. Cat3 has 4 wires (2 pair) and is used for I'm pretty sure that Cat3 is 8-wire, 4 (barely) twisted pairs. I don't know what the technical term for regular phone wire is.. Cat5 has more twists than Cat3, making it more resistant to interference. Cat3 can handle 10Base-T traffic fairly well from what I recall, but you run into problems when running 100Base-TX, or 10Base-T on long runs. IIRC, 10Base-T uses a 20MHz signaling rate, while 100Base-TX goes at 125MHz. I know I've seen Cat5e cables labeled as being certified for 350MHz, though I'm not sure if that lets you run gigabit or not -- probably kind of iffy (not that I'd feel safe running gigabit on copper more than a few feet anyway..) At any rate, I recently heard that the FCC (or some other government org) recommends that new houses be strung with Cat5 for phone. I guess their reasoning was that it's easier to manage that way, not too expensive given the availability of hardware these days, and allows for expansion if standards change in the future. -- _ _ _ _ _ ___ _ _ _ ___ _ _ __ I like your approach, now / \/ \(_)| ' // ._\ / - \(_)/ ./| ' /(__ let's see your departure. \_||_/|_||_|_\\___/ \_-_/|_|\__\|_|_\ __) [ Mike Hicks | http://umn.edu/~hick0088/ | mailto:hick0088 at tc.umn.edu ] -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 232 bytes Desc: This is a digitally signed message part Url : http://shadowknight.real-time.com/pipermail/tclug-list/attachments/20020612/98fcfd0f/attachment.pgp