We started out with 100Mb connections in our home-run wired house and, over time, moved up to gigabit connections without incident. I recently ran a couple of 10Gb links in my home office using DAC cables and am now thinking I should test the in-wall wiring to see whether any of the cables can support 2.5/5 or even 10Gbps. The cables are Cat5e and terminated in 5e rated jacks in the network closet and 5e rated keystones in the rooms.
Any suggestions for how to do this?
I will need NbaseT/10BaseT endpoints, at least one of which should be portable to move to the different rooms. For the latter, are USB/Thunderbolt Ethernet dongles good enough or do I try to find a SFF or thin-client PC that can take a PCIe NIC?
Should I get a Cat6/6a rated patch cords to connect to the keystone or does the short length make this an insignificant factor? Is there a way to tell whether changing the terminations on the in-wall cable will enable the next higher link speed without actually re-terminating? Is terminating Cat5e cable into Cat6/6a plugs/jacks even a thing?
Is the autonegotiated link speed indication good enough as a test or should I plan on running something like iperf? Any particular iperf parameters? Is there a link error count for which the link does not autonegotiate down but at which prudence dictates manually provisioning a slower link speed or should one trust the autonegotation regime?
Lots of questions; thanks in advance for answers/suggestions
Any suggestions for how to do this?
I will need NbaseT/10BaseT endpoints, at least one of which should be portable to move to the different rooms. For the latter, are USB/Thunderbolt Ethernet dongles good enough or do I try to find a SFF or thin-client PC that can take a PCIe NIC?
Should I get a Cat6/6a rated patch cords to connect to the keystone or does the short length make this an insignificant factor? Is there a way to tell whether changing the terminations on the in-wall cable will enable the next higher link speed without actually re-terminating? Is terminating Cat5e cable into Cat6/6a plugs/jacks even a thing?
Is the autonegotiated link speed indication good enough as a test or should I plan on running something like iperf? Any particular iperf parameters? Is there a link error count for which the link does not autonegotiate down but at which prudence dictates manually provisioning a slower link speed or should one trust the autonegotation regime?
Lots of questions; thanks in advance for answers/suggestions