[el lindo]

This is going to sound really stupid, but I don't know much of anything about networking. Is a cat 5 cable the same as an ethernet cable? I need a really long ethernet, around 150 or 200 feet, and all I can find are cat 5 cables. Please help.

[Camelot]

Originally posted by el lindo:
This is going to sound really stupid, but I don't know much of anything about networking. Is a cat 5 cable the same as an ethernet cable? I need a really long ethernet, around 150 or 200 feet, and all I can find are cat 5 cables. Please help.

Technically, there is no single "ethernet cable". The ethernet standard is designed to run over a range of different media - note use of the term 'media' and not just 'cable' since 802.11b uses radio frequency and needs no cables, but there are coax, twisted pair and fiber cable options.

The Cat5 standard is the commonest cable used for ethernet nowadays (I don't know anyone still using coax, and fiber typically has higher costs associated with it). Cat5 cables have 8-pin, RJ-45 jacks on each end, and that's the type of port built in to every recent Mac.

So, rest assured, Cat5 is likely to be the cable you need. A single Cat5 link has a length limit of 327feet, so that should fit within your needs.

[tooki]

Yes, a Cat 5 is what you probably need.

The categories (Cat 3, 5, 5e, and 6 are the ones in use for ethernet) refer to the quality of the cable used to make the cable. (Specifically, the categories describe how many twists per inch there are in each pair of wires... 16 twists per inch for Cat 3; 24 for Cat 5, 32 for Cat 5e, I don't know how many for Cat 6.) 10BaseT ethernet requires Cat 3 or better, while 100BaseT and 1000BaseT require Cat 5 or better.

FYI, the reason they're not sold as "ethernet cables" is that the same cables have other uses, too, like token ring networking and some telephone applications.

tooki

[el lindo]

Thanks for the info, guys.