Acronym for Unshielded Twisted Pair.
A type of data cable that has four pairs of wires that are each twisted together (so that any interference to one cable is registered on both, and the difference between the two will be your original data), with no central shielding (ground).
This cable comes in many categories, the most common of which is Category 5 cable, which is commonly used in 10BaseT and 100BaseT networking.
| Category | Wires | Rating | 1 | Two | Voice, no data (telephone cable) | 2 | Four | Data up to 4Mbps | 3 | Four | Data up to 10Mbps | 4 | Four | Data up to 16Mbps | 5 | Four | Data up to 100Mbps | 5e | Four | Data up to 1000Mbps
Category 6 is shielded. (Someone in the know please confirm this)
LindsayDruett say's that Cat6 is actually unshielded. Cat 5e is not a standard, but a pusedo standard, it was developed as the "proposed" Cat6 standard, along with Cat5b, Cat5c, Cat5d, has anyone read Cat in the Hat Comes Back ? They talked about Cat6 in 1995, but the EIA/TIA committe laughed and threw it out.
LindsayDruett also say's that Cat5 was a major step forward, but with Cat6, "Is the dog wagging the tail, or is the tail wagging the dog ?". Can some produce graphs of a workstation doing more than 100 MBps network ulilisation?
7 pages link to UTP:
