[sjagoe]

Are the ports in pairs at each location? Then it sounds like they did a Very Bad Thing and ran one cable per pair of ports; 100Mbps uses two pairs, so why use two cables when one cable has four pairs, right? :( I've seen that a lot in much older installations, but I'd expect better from 2015 construction.

I'm busy retrofitting Ethernet in my house by pulling cat6 through the walls and pulling out the old cat3 phone cabling. It's much harder work doing two cables (not least because none of the phone cables were in conduit, so it just starts off harder already) for each pair of ports, but it's very much worth the effort.

[ThePadawan]

I phrased this intentionally vaguely, because the details are more complicated, but also don't matter.

They didn't care, they just laid some sort of cable because that's all they had to.

[sigstoat]

> Are the ports in pairs at each location?

there are a variety of ways to screw that up. i've seen a house that has a bunch of cat 5e run, but the installer stapled it down, and most of the cables have a staple through them somewhere along the run, killing a pair or two.

[social_quotient]

Curious why did you go with cat 6 and not 6a or 7? Thinking about doing similar but want to make sure I’m not missing something.

[jabl]

Cat7 is not a recognized standard by TIA/EIA, but there apparently is an ISO standard for it. Also, cat7 doesn't use RJ-45 connectors so it's not backwards compatible with older gear.

Cat6a is probably the sweet spot for home/office/etc structural cabling. It's not much more expensive than Cat6 (or Cat5e in case people are still putting that up), and has more than enough legroom.

[philjohn]

Cat Cat6a is a pain to retrofit as it's stiffer and thicker than Cat6 in most cases. It's also more expensive (less so than before, but the delta is still there)

If each run is <55m then Cat6 can still do 10Gbps.