It might be time to change your ethernet cords!

Ethernet cords 101

Why would you need to change your ethernet cords?  You’re probably asking that because you’ve been using the ones in your hose for years without a problem.  This can seem quite different if you really consider the process of the network cords you have now.   Older houses are probably only using Cat5 or Cat5e cables.  The newer ones probably cat 6 but did you know there are more than that.  We’ve got Cat 1 ,2, 3 ,4, 5, 5e, 6, 6a,7,7a,8.  Each one of these is a much faster and more productive than the next.  Here’s a graphic to show you what I mean:

Those ethernet cables

Most of the time, those old ethernet cables are slowing you down.   If you are going to install ethernet cables into your house infrastructure you really should install the highest possible cat cable you can into your house.  This isn’t going to be  cheap but it will at least help with speed and it will also make it more useable in the future.  You might only have speeds of 10000mps down or up.  If you decide later on you want more speed you could easily upgrade your fiber speeds and be able to use the speeds without having to redo your ethernet cables in your house.  Gaming on ethernet cables would make it so much faster and less lag on the network than if you didn’t have those faster cables.

Network speeds to your Modem

If you don’t upgrade the cables from your modem to router if you have one of those then you will not be increasing the speeds of the network.  You’ll be bottlenecking all the speeds because of the cables you are using to the router to the modem.  You should consider buying a small cat8 cable and installing that into your router and connecting it to the modem.  This way the speeds will not be bottlenecked.  Also if you choice to use the highest speeds possible then will will allow you to get the most bandwidth from your ISP provider.  If you really do want the fast speeds possible, consider buying your modem and stop renting  your modem from the ISP.  This will help you in the future because the speed of the modem can be increased as the speed from the ISP.  ISP might be using some kind of throttling software in their modems to make it much slower for you for bandwidth.  This might be used or might not be used it just depends on the ISP.

Finally as you can see if you are like me, I use network cables in my house due to the saturation of the WIFI networks in my area.  This way I can get the most out of my ISP and not depend so much on my WIFI.  It can help with me to not have network interference from other WIFI broadcasting equipment.  I recently bought Cat 7 cables to help with my speeds on my modem since I can get 10gbps down and 5gbps down.  Which makes me having faster downloads and faster network speeds.   Don’t forget to check your cables from time to time for wear and tear and replace them from time to time.