Don't buy Cat6 cabling

Most cabling companies and virtually all manufacturers of cabling systems would prefer you to buy Cat6 cabling rather than Cat5e. My belief, as Managing Director of an honest cabling company, is that it's unlikely you'll need Ethernet speeds of more than 1Gigabit to the desk for the next ten years unless you running very demanding applications. Therefore, save your money and opt for a Cat5e cabling system. No adopted standard runs on Cat6 that doesn't already run on a compliant Cat5e cabling system, so why buy Cat6?

Cat6a, when the standard is ratified, will support 10Gigabit Ethernet so there will be a case for it in backbones, data centres and for bandwidth-heavy applications. Any Cat6a cabling systems currently being installed are proprietary systems that should meet the draft standard for Cat6a channels. It will be a while before the standard is ratified for permanent link and for the individual components of the cabling system i.e. patch leads, cable, sockets etc. Until then, every component in your cabling system would have to be supplied by the same manufacturer.

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