A technician is pulling NEW horizontal runs for a small-office network that must carry both Gigabit Ethernet (1000BASE-T) data and IEEE 802.3at Power over Ethernet (PoE+) to wireless access points. To keep material costs low while still meeting current standards, which category of unshielded twisted-pair (UTP) cable should the technician install?
Category 5e (Cat 5e) is the minimum cabling category that current TIA/EIA-568-D guidelines recommend for new installations that will support Gigabit Ethernet. It provides the required 1 Gbps bandwidth up to 100 m and, with 24-AWG conductors, has sufficiently low DC resistance for all present PoE variants (802.3af/at/bt). While the original 1000BASE-T specification can run over high-quality Cat 5, that cable is long obsolete and no longer manufactured, so using it would violate best-practice recommendations. Cat 3 cannot exceed 10 Mbps, and Cat 6-though fully compatible-adds unnecessary cost for the stated requirements.
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