[ILUG] Need Advice Netgear Gigabit stuff, home use.

[Brendan Minish]

On Mon, 2009-12-07 at 09:10 +0000, Frank Murphy (Frankly3D) wrote:

> As there may be some electrical wiring nearby.
> Would shielded cat6a be the way to go, for the storage.
> use wireless on the rest (kids upstairs youtube etc..)

GigE runs fine on well(*) installed, good quality Cat5e out to the full
segment reach of 100M. 
It's not a great plan to install it right next to existing wiring and
there may be wiring regulations against this. 
However if it's more than around 2 times it's own diameter from mains
wiring it will be fine from a cross-talk and noise ingress perspective. 

On Copper 10G ethernet is specified to 55m reach on Cat6 and 45M on
cat5e. I do not expect 100G Ethernet to have any significant reach on
copper. 

You might want to consider installing OM3 fibre, especially if there are
places that will be difficult to get at again later. Right now GigE is
plenty but in a few years time it will again be the bottle neck between
remote storage and local applications. Just as has happened over the
years with 10m and 100m Ethernet. 
OM3 fibre is in the spec for 10GBASE-SR  as well as 40GBASE-SR4 (40Gig),
100GBASE-SR10 (100Gig) and the emerging Terabit standards so optical
networking has a longer growth path than copper (due to the bandwidth of
the underlying medium )


(*) be sure to preserve the twists as close as you can to the punchdown
or connectors as it's the twists that minimise cross-talk and noise
ingress. Make sure that the colour code is correct (568b)
http://www.rogerwendell.com/images/computers/tia-eia_standard_rj-45_568b_reverse_view.gif

I know of one installed network where they invented their own 'in house
' standard and it worked fine at 10M and not at all at 100M  


.brendan