| Quote: | |  | |
| What Lob said is correct 
"A lot of people seem to think that you can transmit data at gigabit speeds over standard CAT5 cable. This is a myth though. Currently, the only twisted pair cables that support gigabit Ethernet are CAT5E and CAT6. There is also an emerging CAT7 standard, but I don’t think that CAT7 cable exists yet." | |
| | |
Umm, just felt the need to correct a few points here in case others get a little mislead. Cat 7 cable was ratified as a standard in 2002 and has existed in the real world for quite some time.
Now about the gigabit cable issue. Yes you CAN use standard category 5 cable to run gigabit ethernet, it is
not a myth. You can theoretically get any bit of wire to do whatever you want, the only problem is that the error rate will increase as the distance increases. If you used cat 5 for gigabit ethernet at a distance of 100 meters (the standard specified distance) you would be breaking the standard, but chances are that it would probably work.
Now if you used it for a distance of only 2 meters then of course it will work! In fact you'd probably also get away with it using category 3 cable at a short distance. Try it - you'll see it does work.
Anyway, as Lob already said a standalone gigabit switch added to your existing/router switch is the cheapest way to go. They cost almost nothing these days. I would question whether many home users actually needs this kind of thing. Assuming your connection is full-duplex (which almost all are when going to a switch) you'll get approx 12Mbytes/sec on 100Mbit ethernet and 125Mbytes/sec using gigabit ethernet. Now I'd love to see you get 125MByte/sec off your hard disc! You might see a small speed increase in speed, but nothing in the orders of magnitude that might expecting. Ever wondered why there aren't many home routers running at 1000Mbit?
By the way, even though Al Gore seems to have made this terminology famous by referring to the internet as a "series of big tubes" I can assure you that there are no tubes inside your router whatsoever. Network engineers sometimes fret over what might be referred to as backplane or maximum switching bandwidth but I can assure you that even then, except in the rarest of circumstances, are such discussions ever relevant to the real world.
Remember at 100Mbit you can still copy all those pirated DIVX movies that your mate downloaded off the internet in approximately 60 seconds.
10/1000Mbs routers anywhere? How much for a decent one? In PC shops I seem to find only 10/100Mbps routers. 
...the modem would still be bottle neck for external internet connection. 
Linear Mode
