if I'm ordering an ethernet cable for my home network, do I need to worry whether it's cat5, 6, 8 whatever?

I didn't realize there were cats > 5.

Ironically, I'm replacing one that my cat chewed all to hell.

@rpardee you might want to use cat 6, specially if you have gigabit ports on your computer and router.

cat 5 (in my opinion) is too fragile and prone to failure, if this happens it will revert back to 100mbit connections or simply fail

@voltronic @elmaxx I'm happy to spend a whole $9 on something that's overcapacity or whatever, so long as it has the braiding that my cat dislikes chewing.

@rpardee
I'm sure it will work. But I don't necessarily believe that these cheap cables sold on Amazon are true cat [whatever]. I doubt they've been properly tested and certified. But for short runs I'm sure it doesn't matter, and pretty much no home user needs true Cat8 anyway.

@elmaxx

@rpardee
If you have cable that works already, you can discourage chewing by adding this stuff. The name brand version is Techflex, and it comes in many different versions.
a.co/d/75QyBVG

@elmaxx

@rpardee @voltronic
no cat bites because it likes biting....

it bites because of spite and likes annoying their humans

God I love my cats

@rpardee @voltronic up to you really, cat8 is more for data centers, while most home cases would be ok with cat6

@rpardee @voltronic @elmaxx

They'll all work, on a purely electrical level, Ethernet's Ethernet. The difference is the maximum bandwidth you can push through them.

CAT8 is rated to, like, 40 gigabits a second, which is more than you can make.

CAT6 tops out at 10 Gbps, CAT5 at 100Mbps.

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