Everything You Need to Know About Having Category (Cat) 6 Data Cabling in Your Home

Cabled network is actually an excellent alternative to having Wi-Fi in your home. It is much faster and even more reliable. Unlike Wi-Fi, distance and interferences from competing networks do not affect cabled network. Ethernet cables often come in a range of categories and the key to having an effective and reliable cabled network in your home is choosing the correct one. Cat 6 data cabling solutions are becoming popular amongst homeowners because of the bundle of benefits. Before you install the cabling in your home, here are a few things you may want to know about it.

Cat 6 Data Cabling Will Offer You Increased Speeds

High speed is often the desire of anyone in need of a local area network. Cat 6 data cables owe their high speeds to how they are constructed. Category-rated data cables usually contain wires that are grouped into distinct colour coded pairs. For Cat 6 data cables, separators are added within the cables during construction to prevent the pairs wires from coming into contact with each other. This in turn eliminates electronic interferences among the pairs and this helps augment the speed of the cables. Remember that network speed and internet speed are different aspects. While your internet speeds may remain practically the same when upgrading your data cabling, Cat 6 data cables will give you high network speeds, making them ideal for transferring files between your computers.

 All the Components in Your Network May Have to be Gigabit Compatible

Cat 6 data cables are designed to support gigabit data rates. Therefore, all the equipment you are using within your network need to be gigabit certified. This may include among others, gigabit-compatible network cards for your computers and gigabit-certified routers. If your devices are rated at lower speeds, they are likely to operate at relatively lower speeds.

Compatibility Is a Key Element of Cat 6 Data Cabling

Cat 6 data cables are compatible with their immediate lower category rating. This means that if you previously had the next category down and are upgrading to Cat 6 data cables, you won't run into any compatibility problems using the equipment of the previous category. However, you will not get high speed benefits that come with Cat 6 cables. The compatibility of Cat 6 data cabling also makes it scalable. With the ever-advancing technology, you may want to upgrade network devices. The scalability of Cat 6 data cabling will ensure it remains compatible with any upgrades you might make in future.

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