[wplug] Good hubs and what not.

[jmh3 at linuxfreak.com]

> >ron he's right. and so are you. you cable will still work, but it
> wont >qualify for cat 5. the things he listed above are standards. if
> you don't >want to adhere to them thats fine, and it may be fine for
> home lans.
> 
> Yes and no, cause 100MB will not run on cat3.

my understanding is that cat5 is a series of standards that the industry
agreed apon, kinda like posix. in order to guarantee that your 100Mb
hardware will run correctly, it has to be on cat5. in order for your cable
to be considerd cat5 it has to follow the cat5 standards. sure, your
network may be running fine on cat5 wire with cat5 connectors, etc. but
for the network to be considered cat5 it has to follow _all_ of the cat5
standards. 

this way if there are any problems and you call up your nic manufacturer
you can say you have a cat5 network. your switch/nic doesnt "know"
anything about your cable/network. All they do is send and recieve signals
up and down the cable. they arent going to say hey thats cat3, and i'm not
going to run on it. what will happen is more packet loss and collisions. 
kinda like programs who claim to be posix compliant, but really are not.
you and i may not notice it, but it may become more apparent as you
integrate it's output with other programs expecting posix compliant
output.

In order to achieve the best bandwidth and dataquality your hardware can
support you should adhere to the standards. For a home lan it probably
wont matter too much, but for it to be considered cat5 he is correct.

john