Quote:
Originally Posted by woob
I can't imagine having CAT6A 10gb in my house right now. I guess if I planned to live here for ever, it might prove to be worthwhile??
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Fair. It depends on your typical internet and intranet usage.
The incremental cost of Cat 6A vs Cat 6 or Cat 5e was like $100-150 for the whole house when I did it. So it was worth the extra cost for future proofing since it's a PITA to oull cable. Replacing the cable is not as simple as swapping a modem, so it was worth the up front cost hands down to me.
With a quick glance, right now the difference is about $100-250 for the whole house for a spool of 1000 ft (I used about 400ft for pulling line to around 40-60% of my home). I think it's still worth choosing 6 or 6A over 5e at those incremental prices. Plus, technology moves fast. It's possible I might be able to start taking advantage of the difference in 3-5 years.
With network cards, in theory I'm still bottlenecked at 1 Gbps data transfer so there shouldn't be a difference. But I've noticed the transfer rates seem slightly better (likely due to the shielding) when transferring large amounts of data to a file server when comparing to Cat 5e lines at my office and my old townhouse.
Seems trivial until you attempt to copy 10+ GB of photos after a photo shoot or vacation to a file server and give multiple people a copy. It feels so good to see sustain transfer/copy speeds over 100 Mbps vs the typical 12-22 Mbps of other methods of data transfers.
Plus when the parents and inlaws "want a copy of the best photos" it's faster and worth it to "select all" to their computer and let them delete themselves vs picking and choosing selectively before transferring. (Anyone who fixes or deals with tech for old people understands this a bit more)