After seeing that my wireless speeds were much faster than the speeds I was getting over Ethernet, I decided to invest in some new cables. I didn’t know it before, but I saw while I was changing them out that my current cables were Cat 5e. While putting my network together, I had just been grabbing whatever cables I could find in my scrap drawers. Now I have Cat 8 cables and my speeds jumped from 7MB/s to an average of over 40MB/s. It’s a much bigger improvement than I expected, especially for such a small investment.
Yep. There was an assumption 20 years ago when common switches were 100Mbps and running cat5e that you’d have to upgrade cable to get the next speed tier, 1Gbps.
It propagated wildly, but was always incorrect. Cat5e was very much capable of gigabit Ethernet by design.
It was only beyond gig that you’d need cat6, and even then at short lengths 2.5/5/10Gbe has a good chance of working on cat5e anyway (but don’t do it).