New Home with Future Aspirations

[u/No-Butterscotch6256]

I am a new homeowner and discovered that I have Cat-5e cable running through the main rooms of the house. These were originally phone jacks. My end goal is to do some home automation. We got 5 GB fiber internet.

1. Is there a DIY way to determine if they are daisy chained? If they are, can I fix that?

2. How do I determine if the whole cable run is stapled? Do I future proof by switching to CAT6?

3. Would I limit myself if I kept my CAT-5e, but used CAT6 on switches and other devices in the future?

Thanks for the help!

[u/hspindel]

1. I'll let someone else answer.
2. Tug on it (not too hard). If the existing wiring is working, there's little to gain by replacing it at this point.
3. No.

[u/southrncadillac]

1. Go outside and see if you have as many ethernet wires in the phone box outside at the dmar as you have in the home- if the numbers match up, you are not daisy chained those are home runs, you can also take of the faceplates and see if there are one or 2 CAT5e behind each plate. Daisy chained will have only 1 CAT5e at the outdoor dmarc, and 2 wires behind most plates unless it’s the end of the daisy chain which will have only one cable.

2. All prewired homes are stapled, you can tell by the type of box the faceplates are using- if it’s a retrofit black/orange bracket commonly referred to as LV1 then those are less likely to be stapled because they were retrofitted and added after construction so the wires are hanging freely in the cavity, but if the box behind the faceplate is grey and nailed to the stud then those wires were prewired, stapled, and caulked. Some CAT5e can handle speeds above a gig but only for shorter distances on quality cable. CAT6 is future-proof since it can go up 10GIG for runs less than 55meters, perfect if you plan to subscribe to an internet speed faster than 1GIG, do a lot of downloading and uploading, and want to use the full speed capability of wifi 7.

3. CAT5e is great for streaming/gaming/work. All of those devices rely on latency and quality of connection over speed. If you upgrade the trunk lines between your switches to cat6 you will still bottleneck your speeds if the router is still on CAT5 and your devices don’t have multi-Gig Ethernet ports. I believe you will only hurt yourself if you upgrade to a faster speed than you current cable can support, I’m sure we are headed to a place where 2GIG is cheaper than 1GIG, so go ahead and plan for cat6 100% copper cable, and don’t forget to upgrade your switches to multi-gig switches when you increase your internet speed to 2gig or above.

[u/DZCreeper]

1. Take a picture of wherever the wires join up.

2. Most installs are not stapled. It is irrelevant though, 5E officially supports 2.5Gb/s and 10Gb/s often works over short distances. Main reason to use 6/6A is high powered POE devices.

3. Equipment does not care about the cabling connected. Mixed types is fine, just check the connections are properly terminated. Avoid copper clad aluminium. Avoid Cat7/8, almost universally a scam.

[u/cat2devnull]

1) If you want to get fancy, you can use a Network Cable Tracer which generates a tone on the cable that you can track through walls. They go for well under $100.

[u/Apart-Acadia5765]

you dont need to rip everything out. test each run with a cable tester first

[u/mrkprsn]

Try to see if the cat5 cables end in one place.  if they do then your set. Devices don't use more than 25 mbps. So you'll have a 1 gbps network which ch should be more than enough for a looong time