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Is it worth upgrading Ethernet & usb cables in my home?

I currently use cat5 Ethernet cables to connect my tv, blu ray player, av receiver, wii and sky hd box to my internet router. I will soon be changing from 2mb broadband to 100mb fibre optic. I'm no expert, so I know I may never achieve 100mb downloading speeds, however I am curious, should I upgrade all my cables to cat5e or cat6 Ethernet? Or should I remain with the cat5? As well as general downloading, I will be streaming hd quality video.

Likewise I have 2 hard drives connected to the blu ray player using usb2.0, is there any point in upgrading these to usb3.0 for watching hd quality video? For transferring from my laptop to the hard drives would 3.0 mean faster transfers?

Thank you in advance...

3 Answers

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  • Adrian
    Lv 7
    8 years ago
    Favorite Answer

    Regular Cat5 is ok for 100mbps, up to almost 100M. So, no need to change for that reason. However, if you plan on running any Gigabit devices, you will need to upgrade to Cat5e or Cat6.

    That said, for short distances, regular Cat5 will work at gigabit speeds, maybe to 30-50 feet or more. I know, because a few of my cables in the walls are Cat5 only (rest are Cat5e, and I can run gigabit over all of them with no problems). Remember that gigabit requires all 8 wires to be punched down (they usually are, but old Cat5 installations may have skipped some wires).

    If your internet service is 100mbps, you can run regular Cat5 from the ISP interface to any router you have. From there, depends on router interface speed, if it is 100mbps only, then Cat5 will do fine. You can always add a gigabit switch for interconnecting computers and wire those with cat5e or better.

    USB2.0 is still faster than 100mbps, which more than enough for streaming video. However, overall data transfers are faster for USB3.0

  • 8 years ago

    Cat 5 can support gigabit (1000 Mbps), but it is less protected against EMI than 5e, so its real max speed may be lower than 1 gigabit when in a EMI-heavy environment. With that being said, I think that is can easily sustain 100mbps(12.5Megabytes's) as long as your router or switches( if you have any) also support fast Ethernet(100mbps).

    if the hardware doesn't support USB 3.0, then simply putting in cables that claim to be 3.0 compatible won't change a thing. USB 2.0's bandwidth easily bottlenecks the bandwidth of a harddrive, but for movies I don't believe that it has a real impact. The bluray player and your laptop must both support USB 3.0, otherwise there will be no difference.

  • 5 years ago

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