Is Cat 3 cable obsolete?
I have a 1000' roll I'd like to use up for a residential remodeling project. (Phone & internet.)
Is it sufficient ?

If it were my house, I would use the cat 3.

All depends what you want to do with it. In my honest, and uninformed opinion, Cat 3 would be fine for telephone and dial up modem lines. However if you envision there to be a higher data load placed on the cable then you should go Cat 5. FYI, the new homes here in Southern Ca say that they are all wired in with Cat 5 wiring.
Scott

You can get by running the cat-3 for phone lines, but I would still run Cat-5 to locations where computers are likely to be set up. Cat-3 is becoming obsolete with Cat-6 on the market.

My practice is to use CAT3 where there are known phone lines. CAT5 for everything else.

Ok the real skinny!!!

Catagory 3 24gauge 4pair will run a local area networks at upto 10mega bits per sec.
we have ran upto 100 mbs. but its not listed as such... the longer the run the more at risk.

hope this helps..

[This message has been edited by RandyO (edited 12-26-2002).]

At long last! I no longer feel like a voice in the wilderness.

For a long time I've held that cat 3 is plenty good for voice lines and standard modems. And here in high-tech Northern California, everyone seems to think it's gotta be cat 5 or better--even for voice lines.

The cat 3 is so much easier than cat 5 to dress and punch down on 66 blocks (which I use for bigger residential installs), I'll go out of my way to get it.

Cliff

CAT3 is not obsolete! In a residential install it is fine as the others have said above. CAT3 is the minimum cable accepted by BICSI (the NEC for voice and data). I am sure one day it will be obsolete... but till then PULL IT.

Or if nothing else, sell it to the local HO railroad club to use for the control wiring of their train set.

TW

PS just run it. I am on a DSL line off of very old cat 3, and it is working fine.

Ok ok.. rotfl.. I must add to this.. I know about all this..
Cat1 - Phones
Cat2 - Phones
Cat3 - Phones/10BaseT
Cat5 - Data
Cat5e - Data
Cat6 - Data

Thats a cat rating from a text book from my lan specialist class.. All you have to do is make sure the color code is the same on either side of the cat3 for the data. but for the cost involved in the Cat5 (52 or so buks for a 1000' roll) its better to just use Cat3 for the phones and Cat5 for the data..

And no, Cat3 is much alive.. you can buy it at home depot, and it is widely used for phones/modem lines by some data installation crews.. Its kind of like the old BNC, its still usefull in some applications but there is another newer shinier cable in front of the Cat3

I thought the FCC dubbed "quad-wire" obsolete?

That's the same as CAT3, right?



Read it somewhere, I swear!

The old 4 color quad was not a twisted pair cable. Cat-3 is twisted pair.
Don

"Quad wire" is the old style, non-twisted pair cable.

sparky66: yes to question 1; no to question 2, quad wire is 4 wires, red, green, yellow, & black, most likely CAT-1, standard CAT-3 is 4 "twisted pairs", b/bw, o/ow, g/gw, br/brw, you can get 1pr, 2pr, 3pr, 6pr, etc. also, but it is not common.

[This message has been edited by Mike_Riverside (edited 12-27-2002).]

I call the quad wire thermostat wire .. Its the old time Cat1 first phone wire that you find in most older homes.. Cat2 is your flat satin line cords found in most homes that connect phones to the wall jack..

Quad wire will live for a long time. We use loads of it for Alarm systems wiring. The fact that quad wire is not twisted pair is not an issue in alarm systems.

Thanks for all the input, everybody.
I bought a box of Cat 5 today.

Redsy,
Just a small point, the guy to ask about this, must surely be PaulUK, if he cannot explain it, it does not exist in the world of Telecommunications.
Personally for anything more than standard voice comms, I would not hesitate to install Cat-5e, especially where Internet use is envisaged.
Save that, I look forward to the day when we are all provided with Fibre-Optic.

[This message has been edited by Trumpy (edited 12-28-2002).]

Cat 3:

I recently wired my house for voice and data. I used CAT3 from the D-marc to the punchdown block and to all my locations I ran bundled CAT5e, four CAT5e's wraped in plastic. From the quad CAT5e's I punched them down to a 110 block and now I can cross connect voice and data lines as needed. At work I found a sample of some home automation cable which is two RG-6U, two CAT6 and two multimode fibers, it looks a bit big to pull but is future proof, at least for about the next year or so....

Thanks for the glowing testimonial Trumpy, but I have to confess that I'm somewhat of the "old-school" of telecommunications and I haven't kept completely abreast of the latest in LAN technology.

You'll find that in general CAT3 is suggested as being suitable for operating bandwidths of up to around 16MHz, or around 10Mbps transfer rate. That's very much an average figure though, as the actual usable bandwidth will depend very much upon other variables, such as the network driver cards, levels of EM interference in the building, and so on.

In technical terms, CAT5 cable with its tighter twists in the pairs provides greater longitudinal balance, otherwise known as common-mode rejection. In other words, it is better able to reject intereference from nearby EM fields and thus allows operation to higher frequencies. The twisted pairs on a LAN are basically working the same way as the twin-lead transmission line you might connect to your TV antenna.

Whether to wire CAT3 or CAT5? I don't get much call for either in residential work in my area!

Personally, I think that a 10Mbps network should be more than enough for any residential usage, and I would certainly be happy with it. That said, with the way software is going (i.e. shuffling far too many binary digits around for very little actual useful data), some people will find it too limiting.

If I were wiring for data in residential, I think I'd explain the options and leave the final choice to the customer.