I'm re-wiring a building and want to get the best cable possible laid – it required re-plastering to make a change to the cables and the cables will be there for the next 10 – 20 years.
Currently there appears to be cat 7a cable available but not too much in the way of cat 7a connectors. Also – I won't be using 40Gig hardware in the near future.
So, my question: is it possible to use cat 6a connectors / patch panels with cat 7a cable and get the same performance as I would had I used cat 6a cable? Are there any gotchas in trying to do this?
Best Answer
Generally speaking, if you mix "better" equipment with "lesser" one, your performance will be somewhere in between them, possibly even better than when using only lesser equipment: CAT6 cabling will not bump your speed up if you have 100 Mbit switches, but CAT7a cable could give you better EM shielding than CAT6a and thus reduce spurious network errors.
So, yes: there is no incompatibility between CAT7a cable and CAT6a connectors, and although you will not achieve CAT7a certification without using both of them (and connecting them accordingly to standards and best practices), you can safely mix them, it could even benefit your overall networking experience, and you'll be able to simply replace the connectors later without having to re-cable everything (assuming it won't be already time to jump to CAT9g cabling, of course).