Guides/Speed and performance
Speed and
performance.
What each category can carry, what actually limits a connection, and what our cables are rated at.
The cable is almost never
what is slowing you down.
If your connection feels slow, the cable is the last place to look. The line coming into the building sets the ceiling, and the ports at each end set the next one. Most home connections in Europe are gigabit or below, and every category in this page carries a gigabit across a hundred metres.
What a good cable does is stop being the limit — and stay that way for years, through bends, pulls and the back of the furniture.
Replacing a wireless hop with a cable, not replacing one cable with a slightly better one. The gain comes from removing walls, distance and every other device competing for airtime — not from the number on the jacket.
Speed is not a property of the cable.
It is a property of the cable and the distance.
Every category carries 1 Gbps across a full 100-metre run. What separates them is how far they hold 10 Gbps. These figures belong to the standard, not to any particular product.
The striped section of the middle row is the part nobody mentions: Category 6 reaches 10 Gbps to 37 m in any installation, and as far as 55 m only where interference from neighbouring cables is low. At 1 Gbps — what almost every home connection actually runs at — the three rows are identical.
Five things, and the category
is rarely the one that bites.
The line and the ports
The connection into the building, and the network ports at each end. Nothing downstream goes faster than the slowest of the two, whatever cable joins them.
Termination
A cable is only as good as its ends. A connector crimped with the wires out of order, or with the pairs untwisted further back than they should be, will underperform a cheaper cable terminated properly.
Handling
Sharp bends and hard pulls damage the conductors inside the jacket, and the damage is invisible from outside. Do not bend to a radius smaller than eight times the outer diameter, and pull by hand.
Interference
Ethernet carries data as electrical signals, so power cabling and heavy electrical equipment nearby can degrade them. The twist handles most of it; a shielded construction handles the rest.
Length
Every metre adds resistance and attenuation. 100 m is the limit for a single run in any category — a distance you are unlikely to reach inside a home.
Follow T568A or T568B and keep the same scheme at both ends. One at each end produces a crossover, not a straight-through cable — the two schemes are set out in Introduction to Ethernet Cables, and the 13 mm untwist limit in the Installation Guide.
Three differences that matter
for gaming, calls and streaming.
Latency
Lower and, more importantly, steadier. It is the variation, not the average, that is felt — shown side by side in Gaming and Ethernet Cables.
Throughput
Does not fall away with distance and walls.
Contention
The connection does not compete with every other device in the building for airtime.
A category sets a ceiling.
This is the floor we stand on.
What a given cable delivers depends on how it is built, so we publish the rating of each range instead of the maximum its category permits — together with the conductor, which most listings leave out.
| Range | Rating | Conductor |
|---|---|---|
| Mr. Tronic Cat 5e | 1 Gbps · 100 MHz | CCA · AWG24 |
| Mr. Tronic Cat 6 | 1 Gbps · 250 MHz | CCA · AWG24 |
| Mr. Tronic Cat 7 | 10 Gbps · 600 MHz | Copper · AWG28 |
Copper-clad aluminium has around 55 % more resistance than solid copper. For carrying data at gigabit rates over the distances found in a home, that is not the limiting factor; where it does matter is anything that also puts power through the cable. The difference between the two is explained in Introduction to Ethernet Cables.