Timeline for answer to Can I use the CAT3 cable in my home for internet? by manassehkatz-Moving 2 Codidact
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
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19 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Feb 3, 2022 at 1:12 | comment | added | Yuhong Bao | One thing I noticed is that both 1Gbit and 2.5Gbit Ethernet are designed to reuse existing Cat5 cable plants. Even the difference between Cat5 and Cat5e are quite minor. | |
| Dec 20, 2020 at 20:07 | comment | added | Mr. W. | This was on the money—the house was daisy-chained. Also, the short run of CAT3 in the house that I'm using works great (see above). Thanks! | |
| Dec 17, 2020 at 6:07 | comment | added | Peter Green | Some Ethernet devices will try again at slower speeds if a link fails to come up, but that is a vendor extension and won't solve the problem where a link comes up but works really badly. | |
| Dec 17, 2020 at 6:06 | comment | added | Peter Green | @BlueRaja-DannyPflughoeft sorry but that is wrong. When TCP detects packet loss it will reduce the number of packets sent, but reducing the number of packets sent over a bad cable will not reduce the error rate. To reduce the error rate you need to reduce the actual transmission speed. Modern DSL variants are designed to adapt their transmission rates to the characteristics of the line. Ethernet is not, standard Ethernet negotiation depends only on the characteristics of the devices at the end of the link. | |
| Dec 16, 2020 at 4:19 | comment | added | manassehkatz-Moving 2 Codidact | DSL in many places in the US hasn't gotten much past the 1.5 Mbps that it started with many years ago. The telcos largely switched to fiber but in places where they can't economically ("middle of nowhere" == Starlink country!) or won't due to bureaucracy (my office, fiber literally running past my building) switch users to fiber, sometimes it is still 1.5, sometimes 3 or even up to 8. Or promise 8 and deliver 1.5. | |
| Dec 16, 2020 at 3:47 | comment | added | Coxy | "6x the speed of standard DSL of just a few years ago" how long since you had ADSL1 service? My country has notoriously shitty internet and ADSL2+ has been standard since 2006. | |
| Dec 15, 2020 at 19:07 | comment | added | J... | Downgrading to 10Mbps seems insane. OP has a 200Mbps service and it's 2020. 10Mbps is painfully slow, and it's not like bandwidth requirements are going down. OP is going to want to pull that cable out sooner rather than later and do this properly. | |
| Dec 15, 2020 at 18:44 | comment | added | Criggie | I worked in a school in 1999 that was wired cat3. We put new-fangled 100Mbit PCI NICs on it and they definitely worked, but there were weird results, like one computer that always took 5x as long to copy the same file, and others that were randomly slow. We only had 100 Mbit hubs and one unmanaged switch, so no stats. The OS showed retransmits, such that 100 Mbit sending the same thing 5x to get a response is really only getting 20 Mbit. In no way will OP get gigabit over cat3, time for some ceiling crawling to check if the wire is loose. Cat6 would be ideal here. | |
| Dec 15, 2020 at 18:09 | comment | added | ilkkachu | @BlueRaja-DannyPflughoeft, well, if the cable works okay as a 10 Mb/s link, but gives errors at 100 Mb/s, negotiating the link as 100 Mb/s but sending only 10 Mb/s worth of data would still be likely to get errors, since the packets would be sent on the wire using the faster encoding, even if there's less of them. (Also, as far as I remember, TCP isn't really made to deal with random errors, just congestion, but I might just remember wrong.) | |
| Dec 15, 2020 at 17:10 | comment | added | Stack Exchange Broke The Law | @BlueRaja-DannyPflughoeft Both will be slow, but you may find that errors cause your actual effective speed to go way down (to like 0.1Mbps) | |
| Dec 15, 2020 at 16:35 | comment | added | TylerH | "May not work well for 4K video," There is no 'may' about it; 10mbps isn't even enough to handle 1080p streaming well, let alone twice that resolution. | |
| Dec 15, 2020 at 14:59 | comment | added | manassehkatz-Moving 2 Codidact | @BlueRaja-DannyPflughoeft Unfortunately, I have found in practice that this does not always work the way it should, particularly in the 100 -> 10 mode. At least one time I've had to dig up a 10 Meg. switch just to be able to force things to make something old work with something new. | |
| Dec 15, 2020 at 14:51 | comment | added | Peter Cordes |
@ilkkachu: some NIC drivers will let you force a speed, e.g. Linux ethtool -s eth0 speed 10 autoneg off. Or set the mask of which speeds to advertize when autonegotiating.
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| Dec 15, 2020 at 13:44 | comment | added | BlueRaja - Danny Pflughoeft | OT for this stackexchange, but, there's actually no practical difference between "getting errors above 10mbps" and "downgrading to 10mbps". In both cases, the excess/erroneous packets will be dropped, and the protocol will automatically scale back the send rate. That's one of the major reasons TCP/IP have been flexible enough to last 40+ years. | |
| Dec 15, 2020 at 13:15 | comment | added | ilkkachu | cheap unmanaged switches won't allow forcing the port speed, but home routers have management, so some just might allow doing that for the cheap switch included in them, given that some support VLANs, too. But, probably not a feature to be advertised, so good luck finding a fitting device. | |
| Dec 15, 2020 at 5:07 | vote | accept | Mr. W. | ||
| Jun 13, 2023 at 16:28 | |||||
| Dec 15, 2020 at 4:45 | comment | added | manassehkatz-Moving 2 Codidact | Not necessarily. You need to find what "other ends" you can. If you have only one chain through the whole house then it may not be worth doing much with it. If it turns out to be 2 or 3 then it may be enough to be worth working with, despite being only CAT 3. There are a lot of variations and permutations possible. A lot also depends on how hard it is to run new cables, which varies a lot depending on construction, particularly how hard it is to get between floors. | |
| Dec 15, 2020 at 4:42 | comment | added | Mr. W. | Oooh, this makes a lot of sense. I definitely see daisy-chained wiring on some jacks... So there's probably nothing to do, then, short of re-wiring the house? | |
| Dec 15, 2020 at 4:37 | history | answered | manassehkatz-Moving 2 Codidact | CC BY-SA 4.0 |