Sometimes an old Cat5 cable can sneak into your home network, when you don’t pay attention before plugging them in, and really mess up your throughput without easily being detected.
Check/test those cables before using them🤣
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I have a box full of them. 
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I was unaware that this oversight could be detrimental. What Cat cable should be used?
Cat 5E (the “e” is important) and Cat 6 are fine for most things for home and small offices (unless you’ve invested in any 10Gbps capable switches or routers). However, if you’re running one near something which can generate significant interference, like a microwave oven, you might want to get the additional shielding of Cat 7.
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At a minimum Cat5e for 1000 Mbps environments.
The bad cable in my environment was limiting me to 100 Mbps since it was on a main switch connected to my router which fed the rest of the house.
Not sure how I didn’t find that sooner😧
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I agree with everyone’s comments… Old cables can cause a lot of issues within your network. It can overload routers/switches with errors and they will freeze or reboot. Especially most residential hardware don’t have Spanning Tree Protocol (STP or RSTP) running to prevent a lot of the errors.
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I’m having zero issues (that are obvious) with my 8 year old router and network. And I can’t remember ever purchasing a network cable unless I needed a longer one. Always use what ever came with a device and reuse, store away, reuse, etc. I’m going to have to take a look at all my cables, eventually.
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I prefer to make my own cables. Store bought are always either too short or two long. I can make the service loop to be just what I want. Also, this way I know what I am actually using.
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I’ve made my own Cat-5e cables as well.
Currently though, I have four 100’ pre-made cat-6a cables run to rooms in the house.
And have purchased Cat-6a cables to connect to switches.
Have a 2.5G Lan with 2.5G NIC’s in PC’s and Servers.
Just a 1G switch in Living Rm where Tablo, TV, and Audio equip. are.
They don’t need 2.5G.
1G Internet, Fiber to curb, copper to house.
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Thanks for the info everyone. Do the end connectors make a difference too? If I make my own cables do they also need to be rated for Cat5e as well?
I should add, what coax cable(s) are acceptable and how can I tell what I’m using?
RG-6 coax. There are shielded as well as unshielded for different environments.
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