How good is Copper Gigabit????

[vincent-n]

I'm investigating the possiblity of purchasing a 48 x 10/100/1000 blade for a Cat4006 switch. I've been using the traditional GBIC Fibre interfaces and not sure whether the copper interfaces can perform as good as the fibre or not. Also, I'm using CAT5E cabling and not sure whether I should upgrade to CAT6 for better performance. Please also let me know if you happen to know of any limitation or things that I should watch out for when using copper instead of fibre. Thanks in advance. BTW, I'm currently running SupII and CatIOS 6.2.2.

[settlet]

I am currently running several of the 1000BaseT GBIC's on Cat5 over about 50 metres without any problems. If you have MM Fibre use this as the SX GBIC's are about the same price and probably more reliable. I would always use fibre in a new installation where possible. The only reason I used the copper GBIC's was that cat5 already linked the floors vertically. As I said I have not had any problems. The GBIC's are installed on C3548's.

[vincent-n]

Thanks for your reply. I have no idea which country that you're working in but in Australia, I found that the peripherals cost involved when purchasing Fibre instead of copper is a lot greater. For instance, a 6 ports fibre blade + 6 SX GBIC + 6 fibre NICs is about $19K while the cost for copper is virtually the cost of the blade itself since the gigabit copper NIC come as default on servers. That is no extra cost for NICs and GBIC modules.

[shamilton-wilkes]

I'm running several of those blades, and lots of the 16 port 10/100/1000 blade on the 6500. Running over standard cat5 with runs up to 115 meters I'm seeing no problems at all. Beyond that distance (which is out of spec. anyway) 100 full still works. Unless I was going inter building or over 100m I'd never bother with fiber now. (or unless I anticipated going to OC48 POS or 10 gig Ethernet in the future)

Simon