CAT 3 or CAT 5

Easy question (I hope). Is there a way of telling the whether a cable is CAT 3 or CAT 5? The cable I have has nothing printed on it, is fed under floors and through ceilings and is the last thing I can think of as to why I can't get my broadband speed up above 9.5Mb when I'm paying for 20Mb. I've tried changing the speed on the NIC (RTL 8139) from 10Mb/Half Duplex but any other setting means no connection at all.

 

i think theyre both wired the same way. i could be wrong but nothing i found on the interwebs said any different. cat 3 is 10baset though, so you will only be able to get 10mb. easy way to check is to plug it into a nic you know is 10/100 and make sure you got the speed set to 100full. if it doesnt work, switch it to 10full. if it works on 10, youll know its cat3.

or just put it on autodetect and see what speed it gets.

 

Well as I said in my first post It only works on 10Mb/Half Duplex - though I have managed to get it to work on 10Mb'full if I tweak the MTU back to 1400 - I'm pretty sure it is a CAT 3 cable now though. But it would be nice to know for certain.

Thanks for the reply anyway.

 

If you can see some where the actual leads inside the cable.

CAT5 pairs are twisted, CAT3 are not.

CAT3 rates 10Mb.sec, Cat5 rates 100Mbsec. CAT5e can do Giga.

 

Thanks Cat5e - promote yourself to CAT 6. :-D

I've now absolutely confirmed it is the cable by borrowing a CAT 5e cable and a CAT 6 cable and I got a download speed of 20.3Mb which was just ..wow!! :cool

Trouble is now I've got to buy a cable of my own which isn't any hassle - it's just having to re-feed the cable under floors and through ceilings. It took hours last time I did it.

Still just think of that speed.

 

you people with your 20mb speeds...im barely surviving on 512k/256k!!

although the fastest speed offered by our isp is 2mb/512k...i live in a small town

cant wait till we get verizon fios tho, i heard our town will be covered sometime early next year