So as I was working through my classes last night, I stumbled upon something that I found quite interesting: The reason that we can get more bandwidth across a CAT6 cable compared to CAT5 or even CAT3/4, even though they all have the same amount of cables (4 pairs of 2), is that as we scale to higher bandwidth, we have tighter and tighter twists of the cable. Now this in and of itself is not so interesting, but the implications are: consider the fact that because CAT6 is so tightly twisted, that when a human goes to untwist a little bit to crimp, you lose quite a bit of the twists–The result? Bandwidth Degradation. The only way that you can get true CAT6 specs is through machine crimped cable. My instructor went on to relate about how a client of his had crimped all their own CAT6, expecting CAT6 spec throughput; but when it came down to it, they seemed to be having major degradation. Unfortunately, I wasnt able to find any statistics on how much of a degradation there might be, but it’s something to consider when we get ready to run CAT6; For some applications it may not be a big deal, but for others, it might just be the reason for that mysterious bandwidth issue that they just can’t seem to figure out.
Josh