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Hi, I have Cat 5 wiring in the upstairs and downstairs in my house.
I didn't want to drill through my ceiling when I was installing my LAN, so I used the pre-existant Cat 3 (10mbps) wiring between the upstairs and downstairs to resolve the problem.
However, my Cat 5 has been degraded to a 10mbps connection. I don't really care about that, since I got a steal on the Cat5, though I was wondering since I learned you only need 4 of the wires in cabling, can I take the extra 4 in cat 3, and combine them, to make 4 very thick wires to increase connection speed?
Sorry if these sounds naive, but I would like to have some honest input if I could.
Thanks!
I don't think making the wires thicker will increase the connection speed. It's digital, and thus works on a clock cycle.
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The voltage fluctuations indicate to the receiver whether the bit received is a one or a zero. This is controlled by microchips in the sending equipment and used in decoding the fast data transmissions. The hardware knows your cat3 cable isn't designed to go 100mbps so it sets the cycle to 10mbps. I don't know specifically how the wiring differs from cat3 to cat5, but I doubt that you could duplicate a cat5 cable with a cat3 cable and some wires. To explain the difference in digital speeds simply, if your cable sent a high voltage(logic 1 in binary) for one whole second, a 100mbps cable connected to a router or whatever would interpret that as 100 million logic 1's, whereas a 10mbps cable would interpret it as 10 million logic 1's.
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The primary difference between Cat3 and Cat5 has to do with the number of twists per centimeter that each employ.
Cat3 has a typical twist length of 7.5 to 10 cm.
Cat 5 had a typical twist length of 0.6 to 0.85 cm.Cat5 is much more tightly twisted. It costs more because of this, but gives better performance.
To answer your question. No, your plan won't work.
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Ok, now that i know it's the twist tightness that counts, when I cut the Cat 5, and Cat 3 to combine them, is the point where I twisted the wires together weaker than the rest?
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Define "weaker". Do you mean physically or electronically?
Are you going to solder them?
You could stagger the splice joints so that you won't have a "lump" in your cable. It also goes a long way toward insuring the soldered points never contact each other.
That is what I would do. Expect the overall mess to operate at 10Mbps.I have a class to attend. Will check back tomorrow.
Good luck.
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Hi Hmmm,
Ok, now I think I finally know the two of you apart. Just look for an upper or lowercase "H".
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I have already made the connections i Just wanted improve them. And yes I meant electronically, not physcially, ie. If I ever do muster Cat 5 upstairs, can the way I do it (stripping wires, twisting them, and taping them off) continue a 100mbps transmission?
I am also thinking about pulling it through, though it's a risky decision, you know if it ain't broke don't fix it, I got my 10mbps, better than nothing...
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Are you dealing with STP or UTP?
(meaning either Shielded or Unshielded Twisted Pair)
If it is UTP and you were splicing the same type of cable together, then by making the splices secure and maintaining the twist ratio you should be ok.
STP offers improved protection from external electromagnetic interference (from nearby twisted pair and environmental noises, etc). Because you probably will not be able to maintain the integrity of the shield, you could expect reduced performance. Considering the relative small size of the splice I wouldn't lose any sleep over the matter.
Of course, the more interesting and involved matter is that you are trying to join two types of cabling together, each with its own twist rate, and associated with a different block-coding method;
10BaseT uses Manchester encoding.
100BaseT uses 8B6T.
Both of which are too deep to get into here, but in responce to post 3 I mention them, because the actual method of sending data across ethernet is nothing like what was outlined there...sorry tru.
In case you are a perfectionist, I will add that when you have multiple twisted pairs, each pair may have a different twist rate (to prevent something called "crosstalk").
So if you wanted to do your best work, just be aware of this.
Personally, I would drill the hole and use the better type of cable.
good luck
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I'm sorry Bill,
I have been steering you down the wrong path. I was only thinking about your wanting to "thicken" the wires, and I failed to fully explain a couple of things;
I was confusing 100Base-TX and 100Base-T4 cabling.100Base-TX uses either 2 pair, STP, or 2 pair, Category 5 UTP.
100Base-T4 can use either Category 3, 4, or 5 UTP. (Cat4 isn't used much)
100Base-T4 is a low-cost alternative for achieving 100Mbps using Category 3 UTP.
You don't however achieve this by combining the extra wires to make them thicker. It is done by using 4 twisted pairs instead of 2.
I don't know how this will work when it meets your Cat5.
Before I screw up any further I will simply provide a link or two for the wiring diagrams;http://www.intel.com/support/express/22507.htm
http://www.computerrepairservice.com/cables/ca_Ethernet10BaseTStraightThru.html
http://www.sslug.dk/emailarkiv/novice/2002_01/msg00310.html
If you try this and have success, how about letting us know!
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