CAT 5 Cables

It Actually depends on your cable shielding, insulation and outside interference. hubs and routers think about it if CAT5 were limited at 300 feet how would telephone lines work?

what your idea is assuming for CAT5 is the limiting effect of impedance which is a simple ohms laws calculation.....better RF shielding be it carbon based insulation and the reflection of unwanted signals and ZOOM you have strong signal build a better antenna for wireless by calculating its original signal and tuning the receiver with a mini disc cone antenna or spend a few hundred and buy a signal booster it's the same thing just somebody did the work for you.

CAT 5 SPECIFIES the quality of the cable, how it's shielded, etc. 300 ft sound about right for absolute best operation. However, you could probably push it another 100 ft - but it would be sort of trial-and-error.

Cat 5e cable does not enable longer cable distances for Ethernet networks: cables are still limited to a maximum of 100 m (328 ft) in length (normal practice is to limit fixed ("horizontal") cables to 90 m to allow for up to 5 m of patch cable at each end, this comes to a total of the previous mentioned 100m maximum). Cat 5e cable performance characteristics and test methods are defined in TIA/EIA-568-B.2-2001.

This is a direct quote from Wikipedia and is what we were always told.

I've got a roll in my boot (trunk) which goes 60 miles every day.

Seriously though it depends on the type and frequency of signal you are trying to transmit.

If they upped to CAT 6 for 10/100 how far could they go?

Unfortunately the specs. are all based on increasing the speed rather than the distance (at lower speeds). Different cable manufacturers use different techniques to meet the cat 6 spec.

As a wild guess I'd say that you should be able to get 10 base T up to 1200 feet, and, 100 base T up to 600 feet over cat 6 cable.

If you test a long length of cable with any of the cable testers it will fail if it's longer than 100m (because it measures the length), but if you look at the other parameters (and compare them to the cat 5 spec) at the frequency your interested in you should be able to work out if the data link will work OK.

Again from Wikipedia... If components of the various cable standards are intermixed, the performance of the signal path will be limited to that of the lowest category. The maximum allowed length of a Cat-6 cable is 100 meters (330 ft) when used for 10/100/1000baseT and 37 meters (120 ft) when used for 10GbaseT. This applies for UTP cables only. Shielded Cat-6 and Cat-7 cables are capable of 10GbaseT up to 100m.

You can always stretch the distance and have it work but if you really want consistant, reliable performance, stay with the specs. A lot of times when you get those little glitches you can't really pin down, it's because something is operating right at or just past it's capabilities.

It depends what you want to do with it. Different transport protocols have different length limits. These depend on what the limiting factor is - frequency dependent attenuation, crosstalk between pairs (usually the Near End Crosstalk NEXT between the transmit and receive pairs is the limiting factor), noise, velocity ratio.

Category 5 refers to the entire link, not just the fixed cable. So to test compliance with the standard (Cat5, 5e, 6 or 7), the performance of the entire link is measured. 10baseT and 100baseT Ethernet has a 100m limit over a Cat5 cabling system. This includes a maximum 90m horizontal link, the patch panel, wall connector, patch cable and fly lead. The patch cable and fly lead have a maximum length of 10m if used with a 90m horizontal link. The quality of installation is critical too. If the cable is poorly terminated, fixed or kinked the performance is seriously degraded.

Where I work we began installing structured cabling 15 years ago. It had to be shielded because of other broadcast systems in the vicinity. Cat 5 cable was not available then so we started off by using Cat4 FTP. Because the links were rather shorter than the maximum length and the installation was done to a high standard we achieved Cat5E performance over the link and they are running Gigabit Ethernet today.

Not all Cat5 cabling is used for Ethernet, with the right interfaces you can send high definition video 300m or more, standard definition video will go further. Likewise ISDN, audio -, both analogue or digital can go a lot further.

It all depends on the quality of the overall link and what you are using for.