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Cat 5 Wiring

Cat 5 wiring is a standard for Ethernet connections in which a cable jacket contains four twisted pairs of copper wires

Cat 5 wiring is a standard for Ethernet connections in which a cable jacket contains four twisted pairs of copper wires. Their goal is to transmit low-voltage electrical signals over a maximum of 328 ft (100 m). Typical applications include local area networks (LAN). They can also be used for phone lines or to connect automatic teller machines (ATM) to banks. Just about any office that has a few computers makes use of cat-5 network cables, although, in recent times, wireless connections have reduced their use somewhat. 

Due to their reliability and low cost, cat-5 cables are widely used in structured cabling (which is cabling infrastructure made up of standard subsystems). 

As a rule of thumb, wired network connections are generally faster and more secure than wireless ones. Therefore, big bunches of network cables can be spotted on the ceilings of many bigger buildings, such as shopping centers and office buildings. 

Typically, a category 5 cable is not required to be shielded, due to the fact that the twisted pairs cancat 5 wiring sustain electrical interference on their own. The wires that make up a pair are twisted in order for possible electrical parasites to influence them evenly. This leads to a clear signal and longer useful distances. Nevertheless, more recently, many a manufacturer embeds an extra layer of aluminum shielding under the cable jacket. The typical connector is the RJ-45 jack, which features 8 pins and a locking boot. 

When considering how to wire a cat-5 cable, one needs to take into account what kind of application is the cable going to be used in. 

The most common cat 5 wiring makes use only of two pairs: the orange and the green. The other two, the brown and the blue are unused, although they are usually attached to the plugs. A while ago, cat-5 cables were used to connect various Ethernet devices, such as computer network cards, to a hub. Later, hubs were replaced with switches. During the days of the hubs, one would wire the cables in a straight-through fashion and this kind of cable was able to connect a computer to a hub. Thus, a typical office network was made up of several computers, an equal number of straight-through network cables and a hub. If the network was made of only two computers, the hub could skipped altogether and technicians could make use of a single cable wired in a special way, named crossover cable. 

In time, as switches replaced hubs, they were able to work with both type of wiring, straight-through and crossover, by automatic detection. A further well-known use of cat-5 cables is connecting a router to a switch and as well as to a wide area network (WAN) socket in a  building. 

Cat-5 wiring allows for data transmissions of up to 100 Mbps. This standard has been superseded by the backward compatible cat-6 and cat-7 standards. These provide for higher speeds due to better shielding; nevertheless, from an electrical point of view, they are identical to cat-5.

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