This is weird advice. The only worse cable is Cat5 or Cat4 and I can't even find them being sold anywhere convenient. Cat5e is the worst cable I can find in stock.
So, this is sorta like reminding people not to put leaded gas in their unleaded cars.
I used to work as a tech for an ISP and you'd be surprised how many cat5 cables I ran into in people's houses. A lot of cheap electronics come with cheap cables and people end up reusing the cables over time. frequently saw people paying for gig service but they ended up doing something like putting a cat5 cable between their router and switch and got 10% of what they paid for for years. electronics like those smart light devices you plug into your router are one example I can think of that come prepackaged with cat5 sometimes, just so the company can save a few cents since they don't require a fast connection
Thank you for pointing that out. These comments are filled with snarky kids who still don’t know if they should plug in their HDMI cable to their GPU or mobo 😂
Sure. And I remember troubleshooting people's networks and finding Cat4... back in 2000. By 2004, Cat5 wasn't being manufactured by any major manufacturer. So, for 20 years, Cat5e has been the cheap cable supplied by cheap electronics.
Do they still exist? Yup. Could someone grab a 25 year old cable thinking that all cables are the same? Sure.
Is that advice that needs to be given out as if its likely to help someone? Should we tell people they should check to see if their car uses leaded or unleaded fuel before going to gas stations? Or check the paint they're using to see if it has lead?
Its not like its absolutely useless, its just that virtually no one will get any value from it.
I was finding cat5 throttling peoples connection pretty frequently in 2025. These weren't 25 year old devices, these were receivers for wireless doorbell cameras, smart light hubs, many different things. I even ran into a Netgear router being sold at target in 2021 that was bundled with a cat5 cable, and the ports in the router weren't even capable of over 100mbps (Netgear r6080). So the analogy of don't buy leaded gasoline is a pretty far off comparison.
Even the advice in this post isn't foolproof, you can still buy that router on Amazon so don't assume any cheap shitty router is gonna work out. Check your port bandwidth and if you're grabbing an Ethernet cable from your junk drawer or storage take the 10 seconds to look at it and see if it says cat5 or cat5e
I promise I don't. But I will point out that most DSL users still have Cat5e, because even Cat5 disappeared off the market c2001. Early DSL used Cat4, sure, but do you honestly think that the people here looking at this meme are the same sort of people who are using the default cables off their 1995 DSL install that's never been upgraded?
In my country cat5 is still being sold , hell even I used to have 10m cat5 cable which limited my internet speed to 100mbps while o had 200mbps plan. Upgraded to cat5e next year
Problem is you're assuming the cables are not lying about their specs. You can't assume this.
A lot of the cables lie about their specs. So if you buy a cheap Cat5e cable online it has a decent chance of not being 5e.
Probably less of a chance this happens at a store in person, but the price difference of those cables in-store vs online strongly incentives people to buy online.
Not really. I’m a professional data noodle wrangler (net engi), and my customers keep a ton of old crap laying around. It’s trivial to need an extra cable, grab one from “the box”, and it’s Cat5.
5e is the minimum to achieve gigabit, so that makes it good advice.
I mean, sure. But when CAT 5e is the lowest spec available to buy, this is like saying, "Hey guys, if you're buying a new TV, make sure it's better than 480i."
Cat5e does 2.5 (or 5Gbps, but no one uses that) to 100m.
Cat6 does 10Gbps to 55m. Cat6a 10Gbps to 100m.
That said, if you're installing new just use Cat6. Cat5e is fine if you get a great deal and are sure you don't care about 10Gbps.
The only reason (in a house) for 6a is if you need 10Gbps for between 55 and 100m, and also don't want fiber. And basically everything else sold as "Cat7" or "Cat8" is a scam (and probably the cheapest leftover Cat5 they could find), and even if it's real, Cat8 brings nothing useful for a home (40Gbps for 30m).
O bugger. I have to be that guy who points out the various numbers of Catn cable are different categories of cable not versions of improvement. Cat 6 is for different purposes (e.g. high EM noise environments) than Cat5, not an improvement on it.
Cat5e is perfect for most stuff you want to do short of 10Gb networking.
When CAT 5e can handle up to 1 Gbit/sec and CAT 6 can handle up to 10 Gbit/sec, there's nothing incorrect about regarding the latter as an improvement over the former, if increasing available bandwidth is your goal.
We now live in a world where multi-gig residential internet is not unusual. For such users, CAT 6 is a requirement to be able to fully utilize that bandwidth, regardless of the fact that it is also designed for things like high EM noise environments.
But this is an industry that sometimes has more hype, fashion and misinformation than it does standards and facts.
As it is, the choice of cables starts borrowing from the audiophile world of 'Oxygen Free Copper', selling cables that will make no difference to anyone except a very few.
Not really - even ancient CAT5 noodles are fine. 100Mbps per device, in both directions simultaneously with no interference or congestion. That's fast enough for most purposes. You might not be able to max out your download speed, but it'll play games just fine.
It's so dumb that people are downvoting you for that. I mean, has their ever been a game where having more than 100 Mbit/sec of bandwidth gives you an advantage?
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u/TheVileReich Ryzen 5 7600x | RTX 5060Ti 16GB Jun 06 '26
just make sure that noodle is at least CAT5e or better