Comment by anonymousiam
1 month ago
My latest house, built about eight years ago, came with CAT6A cabling for all of the phones. That made it really easy to just replace all of the RJ11 jacks with RJ45 (or 8P8C if you like to call them that). They've been providing POE+ gigabit Ethernet for the past seven years, and I'm about to upgrade them to 10GBase-T.
I envy you. Must be nice to open up a wall jack and be pleasantly surprised instead of bitterly disappointed :-).
I recently built a vacation property and could choose what to install. Initially, I was thinking CAT6A but after getting some good quality plenum-rated 6A to play with, I discovered it's surprisingly thick and doesn't bend very easily (minimum corner radii to avoid shield damage are actually specced) and it's not exactly easy to DIY new connectors on them correctly if you don't do it all the time.
So, after really considering the max throughput I'm ever likely to actually use, I decided to go with some good CAT6. It wasn't even a cost thing, as the difference was negligible. It was just practical reality. None of the runs are very long and I should be able to get up to 10gbps on 6A, although I doubt I'll ever use more than 2.5gbps (only using 1gbps today). One factor is the property is off-grid except for AC, so data is via StarLink anyway and fiber won't ever happen out there. While LEO satellite and terrestrial cellular speeds will increase in coming years, when more than 2.5gpbs is available - it'll almost certainly be priced to maximize B2B profit and we probably wouldn't pay that for a vacation house (because this is the US, not someplace that prices broadband rationally like Korea).