[TorqueDog]

The general difference between CAT5e and CAT6 is in the transmission performance; CAT5e can support gigabit speeds, CAT6 is certified to handle gigabit Ethernet.

Additionally, CAT6 is better suited toward environments that are generally unfriendly to twisted pair cabling; areas that have lots of interference from things like power lines, lights, and manufacturing equipment. But in the majority of use cases, CAT5e is perfectly suitable... and in some cases preferable to CAT6 since it's more economical and performs almost as well.

I use nothing but CAT6 in my house, but again, I have a crapload of devices, and all my existing wiring and appliances are gigabit-enabled, I routinely use VoIP and HD video, etc. If you don't mind spending an extra couple bucks, go CAT6, there's no harm in it. But you've already got a CAT5e cable laying around, so just use that for free.


Now that I think about it, I *have* seen this sort of behavior before... sort of. It was my laptop with the Steam client running on it. When I was at hotels for work, I'd play some Gmod in the evenings and whenever Gmod would start pinging the servers, it would kill the wireless AP in the hotel. Just overload the hell out of it and down she went. I'd have to power-cycle the AP before it would come back. I finally figured out how to adjust the ping rate in Stream and this problem largely went away. But it never happened on the routers I used at home, just crappy hotel WAPs.