Chris Schumann wrote: > I'm considering adding a wired network to my house. It's more secure and > MUCH faster than WiFi. > > What category should be use for FULL SPEED gigabit networking? I've read > that Cat5 and even Cat5E won't quite do the job. What will do it, how much > might it cost and where can I get it? > > Home Depot has Cat5E in bulk, but I would hate to be limited to 100BaseT. > > Chris Schumann > Cat 5e properly terminated should be able to do GigE. If you really want you can do Cat 6, I don't think there is a huge jump in cable cost. I know when we cabled our offices a couple of years ago the Cat 6 was a couple of cents a foot more expensive. That being said unless you have some serious hardware I wouldn't worry about doing "FULL SPEED gigabit networking". Most home computers would have a hard time filling a 10/100 link. It takes quite a bit of CPU power and a decent system bus to move data at gigabit speeds from the disk to memory to the network and back again. I've recently setup a dedicated GigE storage network for IP storage and backup traffic. The highest traffic I've seen so far at any sort of sustained rate was 120Mb/sec, that was from a dual 2.8GHz Xeon machine, although it is running Windows ;). Josh