[smartins]

Hi everyone.

At my apartment I have CAT6 cable running through all the rooms but I'm having a hard time finding CAT6 sockets for the brand of light switches/power,tv,phone sockets I'll be using (Legrand Suno).

Is it possible to use CAT5 sockets with CAT6 cable and still achieve CAT6 speeds?

Also, what differentiates a CAT5 from a CAT6 socket?

I'll be connecting all the ethernet cabling to a 16 ports Gigabit switch.

Thanks in advance for any help provided.

[Jamie S]

The socket is actually called an RJ45 socket, the cable itself is Cat5 or Cat6.

A Cat5 cable has the same connection as a Cat6 and there is no difference in the socket.

[roaster]

Here's the thing about standards: if you follow the standard for all the parts (cable, sockets, plugs, termination, cable length, bend radius etc) you should automatically have a standards conforming installation. If you a have a standard installation, then it just works. No skill required. If it's not standard, then who knows if it will work properly? Depends on the individual equipment, and even then only the kind of clever folk who write standards can figure it out.

Having said that, unless your apartment is enormous, your cable runs are probably only a fraction of the permitted 100m in length, and it's all going to be well within the overall spec. I wouldn't worry about "cat6" sockets myself. And BTW, why won't you be using 8P8C sockets with adapters for the phones? The whole point of structured wiring is that your 8-core cable runs go from wall outlets to a central patch panel with the same type of 8P8C socket at each end. All services also are presented at the central patch panel. You plug whatever you want into any wall socket, and patch it across to the matching central service. You can even run loudspeakers this way. You can also run a single ADSL filter with all the voice phone sockets downstream of it - no possibility to plug a phone in somewhere without a filter and kill your broadband.

If you're wiring this up yourself, you need to get the wiring runs tested.

Get thee to the unmentionable internet encyclopaedia to find out what RJ45, 8P8C, cat5 and cat6 mean. (If past experience is anything to go by, this post will probably be deleted by a mod for attempting to circumscribe the forbidden word filter!)

[smartins]

Originally Posted by Jamie S

The socket is actually called an RJ45 socket, the cable itself is Cat5 or Cat6.

A Cat5 cable has the same connection as a Cat6 and there is no difference in the socket.

Thanks for the quick reply. Actually, I saw that Legrand has other series that have CAT5 and CAT6 sockets, so that was the reason why I asked about if there were any differences. Here's an example from their catalog:

[smartins]

Originally Posted by roaster

Here's the thing about standards: if you follow the standard for all the parts (cable, sockets, plugs, termination, cable length, bend radius etc) you should automatically have a standards conforming installation. If you a have a standard installation, then it just works. No skill required. If it's not standard, then who knows if it will work properly? Depends on the individual equipment, and even then only the kind of clever folk who write standards can figure it out.

Having said that, unless your apartment is enormous, your cable runs are probably only a fraction of the permitted 100m in length, and it's all going to be well within the overall spec. I wouldn't worry about "cat6" sockets myself. And BTW, why won't you be using 8P8C sockets with adapters for the phones? The whole point of structured wiring is that your 8-core cable runs go from wall outlets to a central patch panel with the same type of 8P8C socket at each end. All services also are presented at the central patch panel. You plug whatever you want into any wall socket, and patch it across to the matching central service. You can even run loudspeakers this way. You can also run a single ADSL filter with all the voice phone sockets downstream of it - no possibility to plug a phone in somewhere without a filter and kill your broadband.

If you're wiring this up yourself, you need to get the wiring runs tested.

Get thee to the unmentionable internet encyclopaedia to find out what RJ45, 8P8C, cat5 and cat6 mean. (If past experience is anything to go by, this post will probably be deleted by a mod for attempting to circumscribe the forbidden word filter!)

All cable runs are under 100m, that's for sure. The biggest one runs from the apartment all the way down to the garage and is around 50m.

Due to Portuguese regulations, I need to have seperate phone and ethernet installations, so I will have two separate installations, one for phone and the other for ethernet.