Does the speed of the internet depend on quality of the LAN cable?
In: Technology
Kind of.
In theory yeah different cables will handle different data rates.
Making sure the cables are installed properly (no twisting, listen to the minimum bending radius, terminate properly) will help
In reality I really can’t see a LAN cable being the weak link for an internet connection, not unless the cable is outright faulty.
For an internal intranet then maybe. Or maybe even an industrial office with internet. But a standard residential property I don’t see it being an issue.
Your speed is only as fast as the slowest link.
For example if you are using a cat 5 ethernet cable (rather than a cat 5e or cat 6), you are going to be limited to 100Mbps.
Some cables are also shielded better than others, which prevents interference and improves performance.
Depends on lots of things. There are shielded lan cables because electromagnetic interference can induce unwanted noise into your cables. There’s different categories of cables to support various bitrates. For the last 20 years cat 5 has been sufficient, but in the last 10 years we see more cat5e, and lately people are building houses with cat6 or even 7 just to future-proof.
If you have fiber-optic internet, a cat5 cable might be a bottleneck. If you’re at all concerned, get a good shielded cat6 cable and see if you have better speeds or less drops.
Yeah, a lot of people don’t realize because they’ve been using LAN cables for like 35 years, but the different evolutions mean that those cables are now 40,000 times faster than the original ones.
But typically the speed of a LAN cable has always been many times faster than commercially available internet you could get.
Like the very first were 1 Mb/s but actual modem speeds at that time were like 0.1% of that anyway.
Now the best are over 40gig/s but you’re not gonna find many places with over 1gb/s internet and even that is faster than most places have
Your network speed is, of course, separate and unrelated to your Internet connection speed. So, changing out your Ethernet cables may not have an effect on how fast you can load websites because your Internet speed will be almost always pale in comparison to your network speed.
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