Quote:
Originally Posted by wdb
Not to mention that as soon as you introduce converters, any speed advantage vanishes.
I had people telling me to pull fiber back when I did our house in the early 2000's. I still wouldn't be using it. It sounds sexy but I agree that it is largely a waste of money for 99.997% of residential situations.
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I've never seen any reduction in performance using media converters at various jobs I've held. But what media converters do introduce is another failure point. I have had media converters fail. And troubleshooting some of the failures was a headache as the media converter acted as if it was on and functioning.
But as I've said, I would run Cat6a if you're doing any new cabling install. One of the key things about the various speed protocols is the frequency requirement of the cabling. Cat6 is certified up to 250MHz but can still carry 10GigE up to 55 meters. Cat6a is certified up to 500MHz. And Cat7 is certified up to 600MHz. The incremental improvement to go to Cat7 over Cat6a is to me not worth it given the uncertainty of what the next IEEE spec will be for the next fastest Ethernet speed will be. Most likely this will be 25GigE. And when will 25GigE become affordable enough for home use is to be determined. But I can safely say it's probably at least 10 years out.