There has been much debate about cat 6a unshielded twisted pair utp vs.
Cat 6 utp speed.
The category 3 or cat3 standard was used heavily in the early 90 s for wiring offices and homes.
There are two main physical differences between cat 5 and cat 6 cables the number of twists per cm in the wire and sheath thickness.
The cat6 cable uses a thicker gauge wire and has an increased shielding.
Cat 6 supports 10 gigabit ethernet only up to 164 feet of cable length.
It s still used in two line phone configurations but has largely fallen out of favor for wired networking thanks to the category 5e cable s superior performance.
Utp cable is used not only for networking but also for the traditional telephone utp cat 1 there are seven different types of utp categories and depending on what you want to achieve you would need the appropriate type of cable utp cat5e is the most popular utp cable which came to replace.
Unshielded twisted pair utp cable is most certainly by far the most popular cable around the world.
Also the wires have more twists.
The category 6 augmented cable standard or cat 6a was created to further improve the performance of cat 6 ethernet cables using cat 6a enables 10 gigabit ethernet data rates over a single cable run up to 328 feet.
Category 6 the mainstream adoption of gigabit ethernet 1000base t required a new industry standard cable.
Category 6 cable cat 6 is a standardized twisted pair cable for ethernet and other network physical layers that is backward compatible with the category 5 5e and category 3 cable standards.
Cat 6a shielded twisted pair stp and which is the better option for supporting 10 gig.
Cat6 cables also called category 6 or cat 6 cables provide lower crosstalk a higher signal to noise ratio and are suitable for 10gbase t 10 gigabit ethernet while cat5e cables support only up to 1000base t gigabit ethernet.
The cable needed to be capable of transmitting at a higher frequency of 250 mhz.
Cat 6 ethernet cable 100 ft flat white slim long internet network lan patch cords solid cat6 high speed computer wire with clips rj45 connectors for router modem faster than cat5e cat5 100 feet.
Cat5e and cat6 cables are both backwards.
Utp and stp comparison chart.
The cable standard specifies performance of up to 250 mhz compared to 100 mhz for cat 5 and cat 5e.
As a result cable manufacturers introduced cat6.
Cat 6 has to meet more stringent specifications for crosstalk and system noise than cat 5 and cat 5e.
As a means of future proofing your network cat6 is generally a better choice and worth the small premium in price.