What is the difference of cat 5 and cat 5e?

Answer 1

Difference between a cat 5 5e and 6 networking cable?

Cat5 cable is broken into two separate categories: Cat5 and Cat5E cables. Cat5 has become obsolete in recent years, due to its limitations compared to Cat5E and Cat6 cables. Although the Cat5 cable can handle up to 10/100 Mbps at a 100MHz bandwidth (which was once considered quite efficient), the newer versions of Cat cables are significantly faster.

Cat5E cable (which stands for "Cat5 Enhanced") became the standard cable about 15 years ago and offers significantly improved performance over the old Cat5 cable, including up to 10 times faster speeds and a significantly greater ability to traverse distances.

Cat6 cables have been around for only a few years less than Cat5E cables. However, they have primarily been used as the backbone to networks, instead of being run to workstations themselves. The reason for this (beyond cost) is the fact that, while Cat6 cables can handle up to 10 Gigabits of data, that bandwidth is limited to 164 feet - anything beyond that will rapidly decay to only 1 Gigabit (the same as Cat5E).

Cat6A is the newest iteration and utilizes an exceptionally thick plastic casing that helps further reduce crosstalk. The biggest distinguishing difference between Cat6 and Cat6A cables is that Cat6A can maintain 10 Gigabit speeds for the full 328 feet of Ethernet cable.

Answer 2

The only difference between CAT5 and CAT5e is that CAT5e has a higher standard of testing, which makes transmission of data at higher speed more reliable. CAT5e is reccomended if you are running a gigabit ethernet network, though CAT5 is acceptable.

Answer 3

Category 5, and Category 5 Extended wire are both designed to carry 100base-T network signals. However, both the twists per foot on the two active pairs, and the inter-wire and inter-pair capacitance, is more tightly controlled on Cat5e, resulting in fewer distorted packets, less need for packet resends, and the ability to push the network speed to 300Mbps with 1000Base-T networking equipment if necessary.

Answer 4

CAT-6 uses different wiring diagram, also higher transmission rates are native for CAT-6 when for CAT-5E it's an extension (it uses all 4 pairs).

Answer 5

cat3 is working on 10mbps speed and cat5 and cat5e are able to work on 100mbps speed