Cat6 and cat5e punchdown

You can, but you shouldn't. The jacks will say CAT6 suggesting that your wiring and wire match the spec.

But it will work.

Because the jack will say "cat6", but the wire is only "cat5e". So if, sometime in the future, you, or someone else, needs to plug in something that REQUIRES cat6 (this may not happen for a decade...), it may not work, and you or they will be scratching their heads for days... Kinda like when the restaurant screws up the hoses on soda machine and you get diet coke instead of the good stuff.

So if you need to do it because that's what you've got on hand, and only need to do a few, just scratch off any Cat6 markings.

But if you're doing a bunch of these, save the money and get some cat5e plugs that are cheaper anyway.

Jeff

CAT5e will easily do gigabit speeds.

Not following - are you not using a keystone jack system? If not, use one of those instead. Then you can mix and match and have coax jacks, etc. all on the same faceplate.

And as egnlsn said, you could just terminate everything as cat5e, since that will work for Gigabit speeds and will very likely hold us for a long, long time in residential networking.

Jeff

The main difference between 5e and 6 is the physical layout of the wires and connectors. Therefore using 5e connectors on 6 would be compromising. Cat 6 connectors on 5e would be less so.

Cat 6 is also a larger gauge cable.

That about covers it.....they are basically the same without getting into some minute differences (cat6 having the separator that reduces cross talk even more than 5e and allows for faster data transfer..up to 10GB).

But it is a very, very important difference. Also, CAT6 has more strict standards for termination - not just the actual jack, but how the wire is untwisted to punch it down.

If you're not going to use all the category cables, only terminate the ones you need now. Leave the others unterminated.

I'd use low voltage rings, and not back boxes. Category cable doesn't like being shoved into a rigid back box.

Pretty easy to replace a junction box with a low voltage ring. Ask how, if you want to do it.

I believe the only difference is what Skytrooper already said, the gauge of the wire is larger on Cat6 cable. Therefore the need for a slightly different connector.
I have terminated Cat6 with Cat5e connectors and passed everything just fine. But I am not sure how it will work the other way around.
Edited by ifor - 2/6/13 at 12:49am

CAT5, CAT5e, and CAT6 are ratings that apply to the cable, the connectors, the termination, routing, etc. You want to rate CAT6, you do the whole shebang. This is not speaker wire, it is high-performance networking cable. As soon as you put CAT5e connectors on, it is a CAT5e system.

According to engineers: ""Although Category 6 and Category 5e connectors may look alike, Category 6 connectors have much better transmission performance. For example, at 100 MHz, NEXT of a Category 5e connector is 43 decibels (d, while NEXT of a Category 6 connector is 54 dB. This means that a Category 6 connector couples about 1/12 of the power that a Category 5e connector couples from one pair to another pair. Conversely, one can say that a Category 6 connector is 12 times less "noisy" compared to a Category 5e connector. "

Will this affect us? I don't know. Our systems are going to demand higher and higher bandwidth, and we will stress the cables, but who knows whether the marginal benefit is there. As reasonable people, we might make the decision it doesn't matter.

But I don't like that we are giving advice that putting in CAT6 connectors on CAT5e wire is fine, or that it is just a matter of thicker cables or staggered punchdowns. Certification does matter, and when it says CAT6, it should be at least a reasonable attempt at CAT6.

We are no longer in a world of analog and amperes, and we should resist the urge to conflate the new digital world with the old analog one.

Yes we are....those 'digital' signals on the wire are analog.

I think you know what I mean.

lol

unfortunately, yes.