Is A Category 5 Cable Ancient, Now?A category 5 cable can go to 100 MHz. It utilizes the concept of twisted pair cables where each cable is encircled by its own separate ground cable. That ground encircling the wire creates a faraday shield which helps keep the neighboring wire from leaping into that wire, causing distortions and 'crosstalk' noise. When they invented rg6 coaxial cable, it surpassed what the former RG-59 could do, so it was replaced by the newer standard. The same thing happened with CAT 5 vs CAT 6 cables. The older, slower technology was superceded by the newer-faster technology. In the case of RG-6, its basically replaced RG-59, though, where category 6 cable is used, as is category 5 because cheaper to manufacture; and where you don't really need speeds up to 250 MHz, you can still go with the older 100 MHz Cat 5 cabling. Also, oftentimes, old computers are recycled. They take the old one from the officer's desks and they get relegated to someone in the mail room. Thus, when you have an old 10/100 Ethernet card, you use an old CAT 5 Ethernet cable that just happens to be lying around.
Now, a network cable has been around a long time. Back around 1993 they were starting to experiment with Ethernet, and companies were starting to wire computers together so they could talk with each other. The Ethernet was invented in 1973, but as with anything it took awhile before everybody started using it. The patent explained how you could connect computers together with what they called "Collision Protection". It was termed "a multipoint data communication system". It wasn't until 1979 that Robert Metcalfe, the guy who invented it, left Xerox and started convincing Digital Equipment Corporation, as well as Xerox and Intel, to promote it. Most weren't using it, though. So, once it got rather popular, it was 10 MHz speeds. Now, they're trying to make those be 40 gigabytes of transfer speed, instead of the lowly 10 MHz that they used to be. As speeds increase, the lowly category 5 cable is looking pretty pitiful. Fiber optics is the wave of the future as the speeds that we transfer digital information go up and up. At speeds that are well above 1 Megahertz, wires start looking like antennas. Unless you do strange things to the wire, that signal will leap out of the wire. If a digital signal leaps out of the wire (not meaning it's also not still INSIDE the wire at the same time), it might leap into your radio or into the television where it will become a buzzing sound. That buzzing sound is what is termed 'interference'. The FCC has been the government agency that's been responsible to keep signals from wires from causing interference in neighboring devices. A category 5 cable does it by wrapping a strand of wire around every cable, then that wire is connected to ground (not to 'The Actual Ground' or the dirt, but to a common point in the electronic board that drives the wire. Intricate things happen inside a wire once you start going at 100 million changes per second, and even stranger things occur once you get to a 'Gig' changes per second. At that speed, you're almost up to microwave speeds. |
US $159.95
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