I'm about to run about a 120' (roughly 40 meters for you metric cats section of network cable and wonder if anyone has some recommendations for what cable I should use (or stay away from!) and if there's anything I can do to insure the best data transfer rate I can get. I have an old spool of Cat3 cable but I'm not sure that's the best thing to use.

I'm comin from my shops 2mg internet service, through a router and then underground through some 3/4" (19mm) PVC out to the new location with the 120' run of network cable. From there I may want to branch off with either another hard wired or wireless router to feed 3 other computers.

I also plan to run 2 phone lines and a pair of alarm system Cat5 cables bundled together with the network cable in this same pipe and wonder if there are any inherent problems with runnin all this together?

If anyone has any tips or ideas that would help I'd sure appreciate it





Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 01/08/2008 06:14PM by Mrkim.

a friend of mine is an electrician, i shall try to connect with him soon and ask.

fossil_digger Wrote:
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> a friend of mine has an erection, i shall try to
> connect with him soon.




I always suspected...

that doesn't ryhme.

If your gonna go to the effort of running cable run cat6.

Also if you run cat6 it's shielded and you wont have any problems with interference from other cables. be warned tho, running long cables (esp phone) will degrade performance, i'm not ontop of phone lines but you could have some issues running that far (maybe look at doing a pabx solution and voip over the utp - [www.asterisk.org]).

I'm pretty sure 100meters is where you start to run into problems with utp cable (cat5/6) however if you buy good quality cable/switches (www.linksys.com) for both ends they usually have a nice high voltage that'll keep the link running really well (gig), if your only after a few meg then 120m should be fine. Also get multi-core cat6, your meant to use single core for long distances but for ease of use multi-core cable is a hell of alot more resistant to breaks than single core and u don't want to have to rerun the entire cable if you bend the cable too much (tho i believe it's more expensive.. so if your going to be careful then single core is fine if it's in a pvc pipe).

As for safety make sure you stick the pvc pipe in a 'deep' hole, around 1 meter should be fine, don't want a lightning strike to burn your house/shop down.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/08/2008 01:41AM by DarkKlown.

he's waaaaaay inside 300 meters

Thanks for the heads up DK. I researched a bit and it definitely looks like the Cat6 is a better choice. I also commonly found it available in both shieled and unshielded, but the shielded pricing is pretty steep.

What sux is I need more than 100'~ 33M but it's typically available in 100'~ 33M or 1000'~ 330M rolls, so I'm now lookin at havin the cables made up custom since I found a place that'll do terminated cables to custom length pretty reasonably.

Unfortunately the PVC is already buried and is in at about 1' ~ 1/3M. Any tips for lightening strike proofin other than usin a good UPS on each end

don't stand around outside swinging a golf club when a storm is near by. just ask lee trevino.

Wrapping some thick unshielded wire around both ends of the pipe and then soldering the other end to a metal spike that you drive deep into the ground should greatly lessen any strike, it'll still wipe out your gear but it shouldn't then arc inside the building and set other things on fire. (1 in a million to get hit anyway)

As for using someone to makeup prefab cable just be careful on the quality of cable they use ask for just a tiny sample. Good cable usually has a softish blue plastic rather than really stiff. Most places that do 'reasonable prefab' only do so because they use junk cable that costs nothing.

Personally I'd just buy 1000', cat6 is always handy. That way if your really board one day you can climb all thru your walls and cable up your house el-professional

As for the unshielded vs shielded, you could probably get away with unshielded cable if you only want to run it at 2-3M/s but why goto all this effort for a 1/2 assed job. Better to be able to get gig-e

I can hit my pitching wedge farther than ya can hit ur driver fossil

i'll take that bet.....all you want.

Mr. K.

I have bought a 200' cat5 cable and ran the whole length through a ceiling without any signal problem. I had 8 port swicth on the other end and no loss of signal.

The 200' roll was just about $50, so you should be able to do 120' without having a cut or buying 1000'.

Thanks for all the help and tips guys

I decided to take the easy way out and ordered 150' lengths of shielded CAT6 solid wire cable (solid wire isn't as flexible but will do longer runs better than the stranded stuff)with the ends already made up (didn have the tools to do the crimping anyway and supposedly the CAT6 shielded needed special tooling compared to the CAT5 stuff, which means even more $$$$ so ...) and another one for the phone lines. Cables and shipping was only $100 & then all I hafta do is pull it through the PVC & plug it in on the other end.

With everything I have goin on these days I figured it was better to NOT hafta learn how to make up cabling to get over such a simple hurdle.

Gotta love that INTERNET thingy

Again, thanks guys

tip: for pulling the cable through the PVC, use a cable puller

Nah, a buddy told me an even easier/quicker way.

He said tie a baggie to a length of nylon twine and use a shop vac to blow it through the PVC line. He said it will take less than a minute to make the 120' run, then just tie the cables together with the twine and pull 'em through