Quote:
Originally Posted by Kushan
I don't think that's correct, I think there's plenty of poorly made CAT5 cables that are within the CAT5 spec but won't handle gigabit very well. Especially for longer cables. I've certainly seen it first hand, where swapping a CAT5 to a CAT5e has turned a 100Mbit link to a gigabit.
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This is really boiling down to semantics. Poorly made Cat5 cables that won't handle gigabit, are by definition
not within Cat 5 spec. There's plenty of cheap cable sold as Cat 5e or Cat 6 that doesn't meet Cat 5 spec either. I'm making a distinction here between cable that has "Cat 5" written on the box, and cable that actually meets all Cat 5 specifications. There's the exception of certain environments where external conditions prevent a reliable gigabit link being established over a Cat 5 cable but in those cases the cable itself, in isolation, would still work just fine.
As a wise man once put it:
Quote:
Originally Posted by Ignitionnet
There is absolutely no requirement to use Cat5e - most Cat5 is fine for GigE. At least that's what me and IEEE standard 802.3ab - 1000BASE-T over copper wiring think. YMMV.
Sucky cable is sucky cable whether it has an e at the end or not, poor quality Cat5e just gets to suck right the way up to 350MHz.
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---------- Post added at 14:28 ---------- Previous post was at 14:21 ----------
Quote:
Originally Posted by smallclone
Ah I get you. The configuration in the intermediate step must be done whilst wired to a PC. That's what I was missing.
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It doesn't
ever have to be wired to a PC, but to configure it your
you need
some way of communicating with it. Whether over wire, wireless, USB, Serial, JTAG or even Infrared is entirely up to you.
Wired makes it slightly easier to fix cockups though.