 I'm here from Lauren systems and I'm here to hopefully sort out some cable confusion a few people may have you may even be seeing this As a reply to some of the comments I see on well anytime. I've done videos about cable because the what abouts kick in and The what about cat 6 cat 6 a cat 7 cat 8 direct-attach copper with SFP I want to talk about where we use these different cable types different connections between switches or between servers or around the office and This is going to be a general guideline for their use There's always an exception because as so many things in technology when you ask the question of when do we use this? Well, it depends but those factors and there's some things you can generalize about those factors to kind of determine Generally where cables go where and of course I know there's always going to be an exception and that's fine But as long as you know which cables are which you know when to use those exceptions and I'll be leaving a link to some blog articles and Just talking about you know how to plug things in and where these all go before we dive into the details If you'd like to learn more about me and my company head over to Lawrence systems calm If you'd like to hires for a project such as network consulting There's a hires button right at the top if you want to support this channel in other ways There's affiliate links down below to get you deals and discounts on products and services We talk about on the channel including the shirts and swag in case you like shirts with cats on it matters back We have this shirt that has six cats on it And if you didn't notice their tails represent the different colors of Some of the cables for the category five six seven and eight cabling. All right now I also want to shout out to FS comm for sending me some of these cables is where we got like these dat cables Which actually this one's a 25 gig cable and this fiber They sent these to me along with some modules because I have some reviews I'm doing but this is also part of that review process Which does include as well the switch I have sitting right here so this is a Unify aggregation switch and I will be doing a review in the future and if that Future has already occurred and I will go back and edit this video put a link down below to that review But I've also reviewed this micro tick and this other unify switch here These are just for reference. This is not specifically about them But questions do come up about those switches and about these cables and about the connectors So I figured they made good props now. Where do we use what is? Going to depend on how far away things are is one of the factors in the next one is of course What speed do you need and of course the most speed would be the easy answer But then that also means the most budget so there's a happy middle that always have to be met first is Connecting switches with DAC cable matter of fact switches and servers that are all located for example Within the rack like I have behind me in our lab rack right here This is all has a series of ten and twenty five gig connectors in there And those are best facilitated with SFP using DAC DAC is a cable that is really simple really easy to use you just plug these DAC cables in they come pre Terminated with these type of ends on there or not something you custom fabricate But DAC has a really good advantage SFP in general has an advantage of being very low latency Very low power especially these direct attached copper the downside is of course You're not running this 200 feet away because well it doesn't go 200 feet They do make some active ones that go further, but generally when you're within the rack or within the server room This is where the DAC cables are great Then especially if you are connecting with some of the cards for example This is a 25 gig card right here And you can see has a relatively small heat sink despite having two 25 gig ports on here And this isn't even older 10 gig card These are really affordable so if you're building out your home lab or getting started in this these are common But I think the question that comes up people assume that oh, I should be able to just grab an inexpensive rg45 type connector But that's usually not the case because the rg45 is substantially more wattage Substantially more yes, it's all a small amount of wattage But that is compounded over the number of connections you have so it generates more heat requires more wattage Therefore can be a little bit more expensive and back to latency intensive applications such as a storage server So if you're connecting like a virtualization system to a storage server, you want the lowest latency possible and Yeah, that goes back to using SFP with like a DAC cable here now What about fiber isn't fiber faster? Well, that's still in the same category as SFP Because you're gonna use an SFP module connector and fibers generally speaking really low wattage Not much more not substantially more. I should say then using a DAC cable fibers more though Not for use inside of here. You can it will work But it's more for when the switches are further away And that's for all references article from fs.com rg45 versus SFP Which should be used to connect to switches and this article is january 17th 2020 I bring the date up because it is currently august of 2021 because with technology when you're referencing What should be used where the date matters a lot as technology changes fast But they break down the use cases and really it comes down to this right here when it comes to max distance One-year building and for example, we do a lot of infrastructure for building in warehouses And when you talk about building in a very large scale warehouse You may have 400,000 square foot warehouse and you have the front office And maybe they have some servers and office space up there And then they have the shipping office at the furthest corner of the building In those cases the distance is going to make a big deal and fiber makes a lot of sense And for example, the multi-mode fiber that I have in my hand right here has no problem at 550 meters If we were going to use rg45 ethernet cable 100 meters now I know I've done reviews on like game changer cable And I'll leave a link to that below and game changer cable is able to break that 100 meter limit But generally speaking you'll want to run fiber for a couple reasons one It only goes so much further than the 100 meter distance And if you have to certify a cable with a cable certifier, it is only certified to work at that distance Second is Any type of copper based rg45 ethernet cable will also be subject to electromagnetic interference Especially in the manufacturing area where you have lots of machines that may give this off That can cause or pose a problem over distance Because all the different electromagnetic interference that it picks up along the way from point A to point B Causes an issue. You don't have this issue of fiber. It's fiber optic now 550 meters for multi-mode fighter and 150 kilometers for single-mode fiber Means one of those two options is going to get you the distance generally speaking You need to get connect either like a scenario I played out with the warehouse or if you have a large facility with multiple buildings And you know you run an underground fiber between the parking lot site to site is great from building to building But a lot of times if if you're in the construction phasing or able to do either directional boring underground We will have a fiber pole that goes between the buildings We worked with the client to do this for example Or they had six buildings on a property and they wanted really fast connections So fiber was run underground between each of the buildings and brought to the main distribution Now mdf or idf main distribution frame where their server room is essentially, you know Where all the equipment may be This is why you have these switches like the unified aggregation switch like I have right here You would then put fiber modules in here and this has Lots of sfp ports that you're able to pop those in and be able to all right put all these together and Then spider it all out to all the switches creating, you know Your hub spoke type of topology or sometimes you could create some different topologies outside of that once again There's always an exception or why you may want to do that for redundancy Where you have the buildings connected to each other as well as to a central server So if one link goes down or some unfortunate parking lot event occurs that destroys it because that does happen when construction people Don't check for what's there before they start digging You can have redundant links, but that get too far off topic the advantages of sfp are kind of obvious They're fast. They're low latency But of course running this 10 gig right here and it's microtik switches are reviewed is still a great budget switch For people starting out and that want those connections. This is why there's so many different sfp options But you're probably thinking alright, but my computer my office is too far away to run DAC And maybe we'll just run fiber everywhere because you know fibers great and this question seems to come up a lot and It's just not practical to run fiber to every workstation and run this all through into everywhere That's of course why we have this right here. I'm not seeing fibers, you know, impossibly hard to terminate It's just not as simple as running a cable But this is where the cabling comes in and we're going to talk about which cable you should use I'm holding some cat 6a and then I'm holding right now some cat 6 And this is where there's always confusion of cat 6 cat 6a And then cat 7 and cat 8 I for those of you that want to go away into the deep in the weeds Me and damber rare did a great video where we talk really in depth about cabling standards I'll leave a link to below But let's just talk about the practical where we are here in august of 2021 about what cable we deploy for building out a office network And the first piece to start with is another article thinks at fs.com Running 10g base t over cat 6 had 6a cat 7 and we can throw cat 8 in there. Uh, this was in january of 2017 So I don't think they had cat 8 ratified then but cat 6 supports 100 base tx 100 base t 10g base t your 10 gig standard for frequencies up to 250 megahertz and it can handle 10 gigs and conditions Of throughput without most length of 55 meters I want to highlight that because there's this constant comment and misinformation that people seem to have That cat 6 is only capable of doing one gig No Cat 5e is capable of doing the one gig connections. No problem And of course you can go a little out of spec and yes, you can probably squeeze not certifiable But squeeze some 10 gig into short runs of cat 5e if it's a good quality cable But as far as what actually is documented in the standard You can do 10 gigs with cat 6 up to 55 meters And if all the computers that also have to connect at 10 gig are less than 55 meters away It's fine to run it now. You're not future proofing if you're Or Building it all in with cat 6 right now cat 6a would probably be a little bit better future proofing But it's still pretty common and we'll get to the why in a second most use price But then we have cat 6a now cat 6a is 10 gig over copper, but it can do the entire 100 meters I wanted to point that out because there is that kind of myth like I said before one that you only can do The 10 gig with this second is yes, you can run poe over both of these It didn't mention an article, but that seems to be a question people come up with oh I have a poe application in you know, the poe switch Maybe only two meters away or three meters away from where the for example a wi-fi access point or whatever poe device That happens to also need 10 gig pretty much wi-fi access points are popular use case for that And yeah, you can definitely run with standard cat 6 poe over that I don't know where that misinformation comes from But if you read the standards that is supported and of course it's supported over cat 6a And these are some of the differences right here when you start looking at the cat 6 or cat 6a You do get better shielding This is what allows cat 6a to go that greater distance and carry the full 10 gig But then what about cat 7? Shouldn't I just future proof my building with cat 7 or cat 8? Let's talk about that now Now this is not an endorsement specifically of mono price They had nothing to do with this video I just thought hey, why not use one place to compare a little bit of pricing prices may vary But at least from one source you can kind of get the price variations you'll see in these cable So here's your thousand foot box of cat 6 ethernet bulk cable cat 6 ethernet cable is relatively easy to work with and Mono price is 125 dollars for a box of thousand foot. What about cat 6a? well a thousand foot costs 279 and This is where budgetary concerns coming. You can see it's got better shielding. That's great Makes it a little bit more to work with and the cat 6 not that much harder It's a little bit of shielding to peel back But of course if you're doing 200 drops and you need, you know 30 40 boxes or more depending on the length and layout of the design you're doing That adds up really quick and becomes a budgetary concern because where the boxes cost Roughly more than double right now in august of 2021 If you find a video for me a few years ago talking about why we were still running cat 5e a number of years ago some of that had to do with the fact that that was Really more budget friendly and for people that just need basic connectivity and are just going to run Basic office applications and their work stations don't really have a lot of speed dependency that just need to be connected Well, you could have years ago gotten away with it now. You can still Same answer get away with cat 6 but cat 6a is going to be a little bit better But this is where the confusion comes in as people start saying why not just run everything cat 8 and i've had people Leave comments on youtube that say that i'm sorry. I don't think that you're running cat 8 everywhere Some people say, you know, it's what we settled on. We only run cat 8 everywhere one cat 8 500 foot box 339 dollars second cat 8 has a lot more shielding So there's a labor cost that goes up with this cable And it's one of the things that really has to be calculated into a job is the patch panels the connectors The little ends and putting them on just when you look at the difference between this is a cat 6 cable and the Cat 6a cable you notice there's a large bulkier difference to it. This actually is more of a challenge than people realize the Challenge is when I have to run 200 drops You have to calculate the size of these cables The size of the cables makes a big difference when you're running 200 drops because you have to have a system That can handle the extra bulk and what I mean by it like System is the suspension that you do for the cable the paths you choose to run when you're building these cabling jobs And the j hooks and everything else that build the support systems to hold these that all has to be factored in So it's not just a cost of cable There's the cost of labor the cost of the patch panels And this all just goes into the budgetary concerns if companies have an unlimited budget to do things awesome Run the best in cable out there But it's a scaling issue that goes back and forth. So generally speaking Here in august 21 cat 6 is still pretty the dominant one you're running But cat 6a is pretty popular But the fact that cat 6 can do 10 gig over up to 55 meters and you take a normal office They kind of are future-proofed at least up to the 10 gig standard if they even need that standard I say if there's always someone saying you should always install the fastest and there's times when Hey, if the company's budget allows it, we will but like I said staying within scope of what's reasonable So hopefully it's cleared up some of the confusion that comes with what cable goes where And why the DAC cables and sfp cables are still really popular and why they're still probably an even better choice Because of the low latency for things that are within the rack But this is still where you run things and I'll mention too people building a new house Cat 6a. Yeah, great if you're doing a new construction for the house But no running fiber all throughout your house is probably still not practical that question is frequently repeated Um But you know there are some advantage to fiber But I've also talked about those in a couple other videos when I talk about the different modules and comparison And final note. Yes, there will be some future videos for those wondering if these modules are sfp 28 We'll be talking about those in a separate video. That's the new 25 gig standard And yes when I review the switch that's part of the reason I have all this because the switch has four 25 gay sfp ports as opposed to just the standard sfp plus 10 gig ports All right, I will leave links to the different blog posts that I referenced in here And uh, allow you to dive in to do some further reading leave questions comments Concerned below or head over to forums where you can find me and have a more in-depth discussion. All right. 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