Ethernet cable

[Tanya41]

Can I use any Ethernet cable? Mine got squished and I need to get a new one? It goes from my router to sky q box

[JimM1]

@Tanya41 Any cat 5e off the length between both will do fine.

[Highlinder]

@Tanya41  For the best results if you are going to use an ethernet cable make sure it has 8 cores and not just 4 cores that the cheaper cables only use.

[Deb3000]

Cat 5e or Cat 6 are your best bet.  Cat 6A, Cat 7 and Cat 8 will work but are over the top specification-wise.  (A bit like buying a Farrari just to do the weekend shop).

Length-wise, theoretically, anything up to 100m will work.  (That's ideal lab test conditions, so working techs rarely push beyond 85m.  Cat 8 is only spec'd to 30m).

Do not use the old Cat 5, (assuming you can still buy it, which I doubt).  As someone said, it was only 4 cores connected and so limited to 100Mb/s.  You need all 8 cores connected for gigabit speeds.

Avoid CCA (copper clad aluminium).  It's cheap rubbish and not really up to the "cat" designation.

[Sue_Doe]

Personally, I’d say go for cat 6.

The “e” in 5e stands for “enhanced”.  Basically, the old cat 5 was tweaked to get it up to 1000Mb/s (1 Gb/s).  It’s going flat out at that, with its accelerator on the floor.

Cat 6 was a redesign from the ground up.  It can do 1Gb/s easily.  While the official spec is still 1Gb/s at up to 100m, there is reliable anecdotal evidence that it will handle up to 10Gb/s at up to 55m.  In other words, cat 6 has got ‘future proofing’.

When we get to the stage where even domestic installations are using 2.5Gb/s or even 5Gb/s, cat 6 will cope.  It’s unlikely cat 5e will.

[Deb3000]

Of course, if we are going to be fussy about GHz then perhaps, we should also correct the misnomer of calling your network cables “ethernet cable”.

There is no such thing as “Ethernet cable”.  Ethernet is a signalling format not a cable type.  In fact, ethernet can be passed over many different cable types, including co-axial, fibre optic and twisted pair cable.  Back-in-the-day, co-axial cable was the only one, so sloppy people started calling it “ethernet cable”.  Today UTP (unshielded twisted pair) cable has become synonymous with ethernet.

You can call it what you like, of course, Just don’t be surprised if one day you order an “ethernet cable” and what turns up is not what you expected!