Cat 4 wire -- Urgent Help

[craige4u]

Hey guyz,

Tomorrow the guys from the cable internet company is coming to my house for wiring as my current wire(Cat 5) is damaged after years of use.

Now, few inside men tht handles the wiring was telling me that they gona use Cat4 wire and I was shocked to hear that as its an decade old thing that nobody uses anywhere, wheras few other ppl in their office says its Cat5 !!

I gone to their office which is nearby and I have checked the wire itself.
The wire is thick and pure copper but nothing is written on the wire itself except my ISP name (wonder how he was able to custom manufacture an wire).

So all I wana ask is how can I identify if the wire is Cat4 Or actually Cat5. Can I check it by splicing it ? BTW, the wire is thick black.

 

[bill001g]

Rated wire is marked on the side of the outside jacket of the cable. If it is not marked it is likely not rated cable.

Even with marked cable there is no easy way to tell if the cable really is what it says it is. There is a small amount of fake cable out there.

The only way to tell for sure is with a expensive meter called a TDR. Fluke is a popular brand and people call these meter fluke meters even when they are made by a different company.

What they may be talking about though is not Ethernet wire. Most time cable wire is called RG6 or something similar but maybe they mean something else. If it is phone wire like for DSL then that also works on poorer quality cable.

Still (showing my age here) cat4 cable used to be used for token ring networks. I think you could run 10m ethernet on it but cat3 does that too.

If you can tolerate 10m you can likely get that to work on just about any wire you can find if the runs are short enough. 100m although not rated to run will many times even on cat3.

If you are running any cable you always want to go cat5e unless you want to plan for 10g then put in cat6a.