Can You Use Cat5e Cable in Cat6 Patch Panel

If you're new to networking or looking to install a network in your home you might be wondering what products go with what. At Infinity Cable Products, we're here to help you through network questions. A lot of the questions we get have to do with backwards and forwards compatibility on category cables.

In short that is when a cable can be used with either a previous category or a category above its current level.

In this article we'll touch on a recent question we received: Can you use Cat5e cable in Cat6 patch panel?

Cat5e Cable + Cat6 Patch Panel?

Yes you can use a Cat5e cable in a Cat6 patch panel with absolute no issues. The great thing about Cat5e and Cat6 is that they are pretty much interchangeable on the terminations and connections side.

So if you happen to have Cat5e solid cable or a Cat5e patch cable and want to run it in to a Cat6 patch panel, don't sweat. It will work just fine.

If you really had to you can actually run Cat6 cable to a Cat5e patch panel and also be just fine. Cat6 cable is backwards compatible with Cat5e and Cat5.

This means that it can be connected to Cat5e connections.

Connect your network with our patch panels.

Speed Performance

Let's get in to the performance side of this. This depends on what type of network you are trying to set up.

Both Cat5e and Cat6 cables are rated for 1 Gigabit speeds (1,000 mbps).

Using Cat5e cable with your Cat6 patch panel will still give you the performance you want. The difference between the two can come down to megahertz which shouldn't be much of a factor on smaller scale installs.

If you are planning to do a 10Gb network with all Cat6 cable and Cat6 patch panels then this is where we recommend to keep the whole channel the same category. Mixing Cat5e with Cat6 cable might limit your ability to achieve full throughput performance.