Guide to Cat5 Cable

UTP is short for "unshielded twisted pair". It's a kind of cable types with one or more pairs of twisted insulated copper conductors contained in a single sheath. UTP cables contain several different categories such as Category 3, Category 4, and Category 5. The word "Category" is abbreviated to "Cat". So Category 3 cable is Cat3 cable and Category 5 cable is Cat5 cable. They are different in the electrical performance criteria. Cat5 cable is the most popular UTP in the today’s computer networking. This article will introduce Cat5 cable.

Inside Cat5 cable, there are 4 wire pairs. The four wire pairs are distinguished by the color of the insulation. The four colors are orange, green, blue and brown. Each pair has a common theme. One wire in the pair is a solid or primarily solid colored wire and the other is a primarily white wire with a colored stripe. For example, orange is for the solid colored wire and White/Orange for the striped cable. The color code shall be as follows:

Pair 1	Orange & Orange/White
Pair 2	Green & Green/White
Pair 3	Blue & Blue/White
Pair 4	Brown & Brown/White

The 4 wire pairs of Cat5 cable are carefully twisted. The twists of Cat5 are extremely important. The tighter the twists, the greater the signal integrity. With tighter twists, interference received by the cable is more likely to affect both wires in a pair equally, resulting in no change in the difference between them. This keeps greater data capacity over long distances. Besides, the tighter twists also suppress noise created by the cable because the magnetic field from one wire is canceled by the other, making it less prone to interfering with other cables.

Most computer users tend to choose Cat5 cable for their network. That’s because Cat5 cable is cheap. It’s also ideal for a variety of applications, such as computer networks and telephone wiring. And it can reach high-transfer rates. Cat5 cable provides performance of up to 100 MHz and is suitable for 10BASE-T and 100BASE-TX (Fast Ethernet). However, Cat5 cable gradually looses its advantage in the constantly advancing environment of technology. The data transfer through Cat5 cable is limited. It can only handle 100 M per second, and thus is not as effective for larger corporate networks or for any process that requires large data streams such as in modern television transfers.

To meet the high bandwidth needs, Cat5E, Cat6, Cat7 are recommended to the market. Cat5E is an enhanced version of Cat5 to support Gigabit speed which is ten times faster than Fast Ethernet. Cat6 cable is the next step of Cat5E. Compared with Cat5 cables, Cat6 provides lower crosstalk, a higher signal-to-noise ratio, and is suitable for 10GBASE-T (10-Gigabit Ethernet). Cat7 cable is backwards compatible with Cat5 and Cat6 Ethernet. Cat7 has more strict specifications for crosstalk and system noise than Cats. As time goes on, Cat8 cable is provided in the market to satisfy the 40G Ethernet (40GBASE-T).

From the above, with low cost and multiple applications advantages, Cat5 once has been the most common UTP. As higher bandwidth is needed, people tend to other UTPs such as Cat5E, Cat6, Cat7 and CAT8. So guess what kind of twisted pair cabling will appear next? The enhanced Cat8? Or Cat9? There is no exact answer. But the certainty is that the research on cabling work will never stop. And there will be optimized cables to meet the high bandwidth requirements.

Originally published at http://www.china-cable-suppliers.com/guide-to-cat5-cable.html