Most British offices are wired with whatever was cheapest when the building was fitted out. The performance difference between Cat5, Cat5e, Cat6, and Cat6a is not theoretical. It is measurable, it affects productivity every day, and the cost of fixing it is a fraction of what the problem is costing.
When a business calls its IT provider because the internet is slow, the first conversation is almost always about broadband. The router gets rebooted. The ISP gets called. A new package gets considered.
The cable running from the router to the wall, or from the wall to the computer, is rarely mentioned.
It should be the first thing anyone looks at.
The infrastructure nobody thinks about
Physical network cabling is the foundation that everything else sits on. Broadband, Wi-Fi, VoIP telephony, cloud applications, video conferencing, all of it depends, at some point, on a physical cable connecting something to something else.
Most British businesses, particularly those in older offices or buildings that have not been significantly refurbished since the early 2000s, are running on cabling that was never designed for the demands they are now placing on it.
Cat5 cable, which was standard throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, supports a maximum throughput of 100 Mbps over a standard run. Cat5e, which replaced it, supports 1 Gbps. Cat6 supports 1 Gbps with better interference rejection, and 10 Gbps over shorter runs. Cat6a supports 10 Gbps over the full standard distance.
If your office was wired ten or fifteen years ago and nobody has touched the cabling since, there is a reasonable chance you are running Cat5e at best. If the building is older than that, Cat5 is not out of the question.
What this means in practice
On paper, Cat5e can handle 1 Gbps, which sounds perfectly adequate. In practice, old cabling degrades. Poorly terminated connectors, tight bends, cables stapled too aggressively against a wall, or runs that are too long all reduce the effective throughput of the cable well below its theoretical maximum.
The result is not a dramatic failure. It is a slow, invisible drag on performance. Files that take slightly longer to open. Video calls are slightly less stable than they should be. Backups that run into the early hours because the transfer speed is throttled by a cable that nobody knew was a problem.
These are the things that businesses accept as the way things are. They are not the way things have to be.
The cost of doing nothing versus the cost of fixing it
A network cable costs a few pounds. A professionally terminated Cat6 patch lead from a quality supplier costs under £10 for most standard lengths. A full office recabling with Cat6a is more involved, but it is a one-time investment that typically costs a fraction of what a single day of network downtime costs the business.
A business spending £15 an hour on IT support to investigate a connectivity problem that turns out to be a failing patch cable has spent more on the investigation than the cable would have cost to replace.
RGB Networks Ltd supplies Cat6 and Cat6a patch leads, ADSL cables, PDUs, and connectivity hardware direct to businesses across the UK, with same-day dispatch on orders before 2 pm. Trade pricing available for IT companies and regular buyers.
A question worth asking this week
If someone asked you right now what category of cable is connecting your computers to your network, could you answer?
Most business owners cannot. The cabling is inside walls and under floors and behind desks, invisible and unexamined.
That invisibility is the problem. What you cannot see, you cannot manage. And what you cannot manage has a habit of failing at the worst possible moment.
RGB Networks: rgbnetworks.co.uk | esales@rgbnetworks.co.uk | Same-day dispatch before 2pm