# Extending CAT6 cable



## Kevin (Feb 14, 2017)

Standard length without needing a switch or anything is 100 meters which is somewhere close to 330 feet.

Sent from my new phone. Autocorrect may have changed stuff.


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## Funkadelicfred (Jan 30, 2019)

Kevin_Essiambre said:


> Standard length without needing a switch or anything is 100 meters which is somewhere close to 330 feet.
> 
> Sent from my new phone. Autocorrect may have changed stuff.


And then any switch should do right? Does any POE switch serves as a booster?


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## VELOCI3 (Aug 15, 2019)

I ran cat 6 700’ and it works. You can’t certify the cable because it maxes out at 100M. Long runs that don’t require PoE you can run fiber and use media converters to go back to copper


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## VELOCI3 (Aug 15, 2019)

Funkadelicfred said:


> And then any switch should do right? Does any POE switch serves as a booster?




No


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## Funkadelicfred (Jan 30, 2019)

VELOCI3 said:


> I ran cat 6 700’ and it works. You can’t certify the cable because it maxes out at 100M. Long runs that don’t require PoE you can run fiber and use media converters to go back to copper
> 
> 
> Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk


Sorry, what do you mean by certify? And in what case would you want to run fiber and then switch back to copper? Wouldn't you want fiber the whole way? Or is it an end user thing because everyone's routers and modems still have RJ45 ports?


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## VELOCI3 (Aug 15, 2019)

When you have a distance greater than 328’ you can run multi mode fiber and extend the range to over 1500 feet. 


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## Kevin (Feb 14, 2017)

Funkadelicfred said:


> Sorry, what do you mean by certify? And in what case would you want to run fiber and then switch back to copper? Wouldn't you want fiber the whole way? Or is it an end user thing because everyone's routers and modems still have RJ45 ports?


Cable certification. Some jobs require it (it'll be spec'd).

I did a job with multi mode fiber. It was 450 feet from the Networking rack to the second building. We did fiber between, and used network switches with SFP ports to plug in fiber modules.

Other way to do it is a fiber to copper/copper to fiber adapter and plug that into the existing equipment using a copper patch cord.

Sent from my new phone. Autocorrect may have changed stuff.


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## VELOCI3 (Aug 15, 2019)

Pro tip• use fiber for long runs for cameras


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## Mobius87 (May 20, 2019)

FYI, POE is Power Over Ethernet. It has nothing to do with the data transmission. It is a method of powering a device using the same cable that the device uses for data transmission, by supplying power over unused pairs in that cable.


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## Kevin (Feb 14, 2017)

Mobius87 said:


> FYI, POE is Power Over Ethernet. It has nothing to do with the data transmission. It is a method of powering a device using the same cable that the device uses for data transmission, by supplying power over unused pairs in that cable.


Power on the unused pairs is one of the PoE methods. There are different types of PoE. Some use the other pairs, some use the same pairs as the data, and some use all the pairs for high power requirements. 

Sent from my new phone. Autocorrect may have changed stuff.


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## Funkadelicfred (Jan 30, 2019)

Mobius87 said:


> FYI, POE is Power Over Ethernet. It has nothing to do with the data transmission. It is a method of powering a device using the same cable that the device uses for data transmission, by supplying power over unused pairs in that cable.


Yeah I know that but at 300 feet doesn't the signal need some help and wouldn't a switch or something like that provide that boost?


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## splatz (May 23, 2015)

Funkadelicfred said:


> Yeah I know that but at 300 feet doesn't the signal need some help and wouldn't a switch or something like that provide that boost?


No, hell no. It's actually not helpful to think of ethernet the way you think about power. And as mentioned PoE is in no way a signal boost. 

The distance limits with Ethernet have more to do with timing than loss. Ethernet is carefully engineered around the time it takes a signal sent from one device to reach the device at the other end. The signal travels in the cable at something pretty close to the speed of light. This is why with 10mbit you get away with excessive distances, 100 mbit not so much, gigabit even less. 

You want to be as smart as you need to be? Limit of 100m between Ethernet devices wtih Cat 5, Cat 6, Cat 99. Beyond that, you have to get fiber involved. Congratulations, you are now an expert, you PM me your mailing address and I'll send your certificate.


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## Funkadelicfred (Jan 30, 2019)

splatz said:


> Funkadelicfred said:
> 
> 
> > Yeah I know that but at 300 feet doesn't the signal need some help and wouldn't a switch or something like that provide that boost?
> ...


Thank you that explanation really helped. I thought it was loss of voltage or something over the distance not signal speed. So anything over 100 m should be fiber.


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## five.five-six (Apr 9, 2013)

Kevin_Essiambre said:


> Standard length without needing a switch or anything is 100 meters which is somewhere close to 330 feet.
> 
> Sent from my new phone. Autocorrect may have changed stuff.



I’m going to get all rainman on you

326 feet, 326, definitely 326.


There are several EPoE offerings from various manufactures that boast distances of 600’ and more. I don’t they are IEEE compliant but they have been selling them for a few years so I have to expect that they work.


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## five.five-six (Apr 9, 2013)

There is also a product out there called “game changer” cable. It’s ungodly expensive and the jacket in is sticky AF so it’s a real PITA to pull In conduit, I’d have to look at my records but it ran cameras reliably at well over 600’ on IEEE compliant switches. 


Another option is Poe over Coax but the cable costs are really high for those longer runs, that’s better for converting existing RG59 to IP


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## Kevin (Feb 14, 2017)

five.five-six said:


> I’m going to get all rainman on you
> 
> 326 feet, 326, definitely 326.
> 
> ...


326', 328', 330', that's why I said somewhere close. I know its 100M [emoji14]

I know that there are products that will let us go longer than 100M, but I personally wouldn't use them unless special circumstances. 

The fiber run I did between buildings could have been copper if I wanted to install a network switch in the electrical room where the conduits left the building. We chose not to do that even though the cost went up significantly.

There are probably 5 ways to do what OP is attempting to do.

Sent from my new phone. Autocorrect may have changed stuff.


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## Kevin (Feb 14, 2017)

Funkadelicfred said:


> Boss ran 300 feet (or so) of CAT6 cable a while ago for a future internet install. 300 feet is pretty far so I have to assume I'm going to need a sort of POE device to beef up the range again so I don't have too much voltage drop? What is the accepted limit for distances of comm cable to be ran before needing a boosting device such as that?


What's going at the end of the cable run?

Sent from my new phone. Autocorrect may have changed stuff.


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## five.five-six (Apr 9, 2013)

Between buildings I always run min 6 strand fiber 62.5/125 for under a mile and 9/125 for anything longer. I did pony up for a termination kit light meter scope and tester and they aren’t that difficult to make up, you just have to setup a table and get into the mindset but it’s not hard to find custom made cables to length with a pulling eye


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## splatz (May 23, 2015)

100m = 328' Raymond. 
So much for working at NASA. 



five.five-six said:


> I’m going to get all rainman on you
> 
> 326 feet, 326, definitely 326.
> 
> ...


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## five.five-six (Apr 9, 2013)

I am an excellent driver.


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## VELOCI3 (Aug 15, 2019)

five.five-six said:


> Between buildings I always run min 6 strand fiber 62.5/125 for under a mile and 9/125 for anything longer. I did pony up for a termination kit light meter scope and tester and they aren’t that difficult to make up, you just have to setup a table and get into the mindset but it’s not hard to find custom made cables to length with a pulling eye




I think the industry switched to 50 micron unless there is existing 62.5. 


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## paulengr (Oct 8, 2017)

At long lengths over 100 meters electrically it will usually work just fine for 100 Mbps. But the timing is getting so close that you might have problems with 1 GBps. That's for either CAT 6 or CAT 5E. CAT 6 doesn't do anything that CAT 5E doesn't do.


Not sure how far you can push POE. Gotta make sure we are talking about the same thing. A POE midspan adapter is exactly hat it sounds like. It just injects voltage onto the cable. It does NOT boost signal or anything like that.. It is no different than a "coupler" (female-to-female adapter) as far as the signals go.


A hub is another story. This is an electrical "repeater". As in it reads the incoming signal and outputs a repeated copy of the signal. They are electrically very simple but are quickly disappearing with good reason. A hub forces you into a half duplex system and you get collisions which modern Ethernet isn't designed to handle (it sees collisions as bandwidth issues and reacts badly to it). Hubs are sort of fine on 10 MBps Ethernet but almost nobody uses that anymore. It is a problem at best on 100 Mbps systems and should never be used for 1 Gbps. So it's probably what you are looking for but for practical reasons hubs have no place in modern networking.



Finally we have switches. This actually receives a packet, then routes it out the appropriate port. Switches work full duplex at any speed they are rated for. At one time (10 Mbps days) we'd argue about the latency of switches and the advantages of "cut through" switches that start sending the packet even before they completely receive it. Since there is no reason to run less than 100 MBps anymore on Ethernet and cut-through switches have no practical speed advantage at that speed, the hub vs. switch argument is over and switches won. You can buy cheap unmanaged switches for about $25 these days off Amazon or industrialized versions for about $100. I really like the Hirschmann "spiders" for this use. The 5 port versions are very small and inexpensive and you can even get them with fiber if you need it.


Moving up the line finally we have managed switches. This is the big daddy. You can spend thousands on Cisco hardware but getting off topic. The one that you really need is a $30-40 small 4 port one in your tool box. With it you configure one port for mirroring. Download and run Wireshark software (free) on your laptop plugged into the mirror port. Then just unplug the device you want to troubleshoot and plug the network cable into the switch on one port, then plug a patch cable from the switch back to the device. With the device port mirrored to the laptop you can watch every single packet going in and out of the device. Makes it much easier to troubleshoot network issues if you understand networking at the packet level.


In terms of fiber there are sort of 4 "modes" and 4 types to be aware of. First we have 150, 125, 100, and 62.5 micron multimode fiber. This stuff was invented back when the transmitter was an LED instead of a lase. Everything these days is 100 or 62.5 micron. You can get a little more distance and speed out of the 62.5 micron fiber so in a new install go that way but the bulk of what's out there is 100 micron fiber. You CAN connect them together but expect big losses. Don't do this.


In terms of distance on 100TX you can get to 2 km according to specifications but I've run up to 5 km without any issues. It's only 100 MBps but for a control system this is still vastly more bandwidth than you will ever need. Stepping up to 1000 MBps there are two standards: LX which is the most common and LH which is not as well known. LX goes to 350 meters. It fails very quickly if you try to exceed this. LH is technically a single mode laser but it will actually work on multimode and gives you an extrended range of 550 meters. Very useful trick to know. I haven't used it yet but if you have 62.5 micron multimode I think you can get 10 GBps transceivers. This is something that last time I messed with fiber single mode couldn't do without going to DWDM.



Back to the fiber argument. So we can then go to single mode fiber. This is the distance king. At this point the basic LH mode goes close to 1 km. But we can buy better transceivers and get up to 160 km. Stepping sideways you can also buy transceivers in different wavelengths (colors) and combine/separate them with a simple passive prism with up to 8 wavelengths on a single fiber separated by wavelength (color). This is called CWDM and gives you up to 8 GBps on a single fiber. Using a single special transceiver that modulates the light frequency DWDM can push even higher distances and bandwidths on single mode.


This is separate from plastic fiber that is used in some proprietary control network hardware. Also this is just the fiber itself. There are about a dozen different types of connectors but essentially the two most popular are ST, LC, and SC. ST is more of a BNC/coaxial style big connector and LC is a small connector that will work on your typical SFP port.


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## VELOCI3 (Aug 15, 2019)

Www.bicsi.org for the telecom standards


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## Kevin (Feb 14, 2017)

paulengr said:


> In terms of fiber there are sort of 4 "modes" and 4 types to be aware of. First we have 150, 125, 100, and 62.5 micron multimode fiber. This stuff was invented back when the transmitter was an LED instead of a lase. Everything these days is 100 or 62.5 micron. You can get a little more distance and speed out of the 62.5 micron fiber so in a new install go that way but the bulk of what's out there is 100 micron fiber. You CAN connect them together but expect big losses. Don't do this.


I've never seen 100 micron cable. Huh. Interesting. The 10GB/s network I put in was OM4 fiber that could work up to 550 meters. OM4 fiber is 50 microns. 

I have never seen a 100 micron fiber optic cable (nor have I ever heard of it) unless it's the cable they use for toslink.

Single mode cable is 9 microns.

Don't forget that there are different types of each individual connectors. There are Angled Physical Contact (APC) and Ultra Physical Contact (UPC) connectors in addition to Physical Contact (PC) connectors.

Maybe @Navyguy can chime in. I know he does data stuff.









Sent from my new phone. Autocorrect may have changed stuff.


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## Navyguy (Mar 15, 2010)

I have been watching, but the comments / advice are pretty good so there is not too much to add from my perspective.

I will add is there I am still not sure what this is for.

Essentially there is three levels of data / communication testing; verification, qualification and certification.

Verification is the most basic, which is essentially confirming if the ends are terminated properly and the total length of cable.

Qualification essentially indicates what the performance capabilities of the cable installation are. That test will assist in determining what sort of equipment that can be installed to achieve a specified performance level. As an example if you have a combination of VOIP and streaming, what is the available bandwidth, contamination from crosstalk, etc.

Certification essentially means that you are guaranteeing that a certain level of performance is available based on the TIA standards. While some business do this, it is primarily limited to data centres and government. Most businesses do not need this level of installation and testing.

For a simple internet connection (residential, small business), I don't see any issue with using Cat5e to the max length and placing unmanaged switches to to repack and retransmit over greater distances; it is very common and fairly inexpensive. The problem is that if you loose a switch, you loose everything beyond that switch.

For companies that rely on performance or have the potential for electrical interference, that it totally different type of installation; that is where you might need / want fibre regardless of the distance.

None of this is related to POE (totally different issue).

That is all I have to add. Thanks for thinking of me @Kevin_Essiambre

Cheers
John


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## VELOCI3 (Aug 15, 2019)

Lots of fiber on my current site.










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## Navyguy (Mar 15, 2010)

Lots of room to grow too!

Was not sure if that was a server room or a dance floor!

Cheers
John


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