Please don't buy any patch cable "better" than CAT6

We had a customer who perennially had rashes of “bad service”. We tracked it down multiple times but never found a root cause. The home is near a “violating” AM radio station which is in hot water with the FCC, so we tended to kick the can back at that goal post. The home owner installed the run from the KPUD gray box to his router himself using a pre-terminated CAT7 shielded flat cable. This was early in the days before we knew better to just say “For your ongoing satisfaction, we perform the wiring ourselves”.

The home recently sold and the new owner wanted gig instead of 100meg service.

We couldn’t get the link to stay stable.

Our $300 tester (regular Fluke) passed the cable fine

Our $1,100 tester (Fancy Fluke) passed the cable for 1000mbit

Our $2,800 tester (Pinky Fluke) failed for 10mbit because of near end cross talk.

I took the cable apart and sure enough it was built incorrectly. Only a very fancy/expensive piece of test gear could detect the issue. The issue was buried in factory sealed plastic over-mold.

CAT 5e is good for 2,500 mbit up to 300 feet.

CAT6 is good for 5,000 mbit for 300 feet.

CAT6A is good for 10,000 mbit for 300 feet.

If you are buying cables rated above CAT6A you risk buying trash. Please don’t install the KPUD WAN link yourself; we will do a better job than you can perform. We have done over a thousand installs and bring thousands of dollars of specialized test gear with us to check our work and the wiring in your home.