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We have a customer, an accountancy office (probably 600 cabled ends) that we have cabled over a period of years with cat5 and cat5E cable and hardware. They are running around 200 users all at full gigabit speeds.
FWIW Cat 5 spec, although having 8 wires, uses only 4 pins 1,2 and 3,6. The others can be split if you're short of cabled ends to allow 2 connections per cable, even for telephony etc on the spare pairs, we do this all the time where additional cabling is difficult/costly or time restraints apply.
Gigabit uses all 4 pairs of the cable..
In our experience it's best to avoid mixes of gigabit and 100mb hardware as IP traffic will sometimes bottleneck resulting in broadcast storms, causing complete lockups on the network, I've seen this problem on at least 2 sites. Some managed switches have storm prevention options and can lock out any offending ports.
Last edited by acropolite; 06-01-2009 at 09:06 AM.
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