Assignment 1
CAT5
Category 5 refers to a shielded or unshielded twisted pair cable terminated by
RJ-45 connector. It has balanced lines of four twisted pairs in a single cable
jacket, which aid the preservation of a high signal-to-noise ratio. Within the
cable there are 3 twists per inch of each twisted pair of 24 gauge copper
wires.
A CAT 5 install is most frequent in a 100 Mbit/s network, for example with
100BASE-TX Ethernet. It is commonly used for other structured cabling,
such as Basic Voice Services, Token Ring and ATM signals.
CAT5e
The CAT-5e Cable is unshielded wire containing four pairs of 24-gauge
twisted copper pairs, terminating in an RJ-45 jack. CAT5e cables are easily
the most common and popular Ethernet cables being used.
There are two types of CAT5e cables. One of them is a cross-over cable that
is used to connect two devices directly to each other, e.g. a PC directly to
another PC or a Hub to another Hub.
CAT5e cables also support the faster speeds of 1000Mbit (or Gigabit) connections.
CAT6
CAT 6 cables consist of four unshielded twisted pair (UTP) of copper wire terminated by
RJ45 connectors.
CAT 6 is backward compatible with the CAT3, CAT5 and CAT5e cable standards, and as
with CAT5and CAT5e cabling. Category 6 cable uses thicker-gauge wire, increased
shielding, and more pair twists per inch to reduce signal noise and interference.
CAT6 wire was originally designed to support gigabit Ethernet. It is similar to CAT5
wire, but contains a physical separator between the 4 pairs to further reduce
electromagnetic interference.
Reduced cross talk, or signal leakage, between twisted pairs.
The tighter specifications guarantee that 100-meter runs of Category 6 are capable of
1000 Mbit/s transfer speeds.
DATA AND COMPUTER COMMUNICATIONS
