What is the difference between RJ45 and CAT5? Thank you for your answer.

-- Evan Sangaline (navarchy@yahoo.com), September 11, 2001

Answers

I believe RJ45 is a connection type (looks like a phone plug), Cat5 is a type of cable.

-- Yup (Yup@nospam.com), September 11, 2001.

Yup, Yup. RJ45 is that dinky little click-in connector, like a phone- plug but with 8 contacts. Category 5 is something which can sustain transmission speed of at least 100 Mbps (Megabits per second), normally applied to a type of twisted-pair cable which contains 4 pairs (8 wires), and which normally has RJ45 plugs put on both ends. Being strictly accurate, there were RJ45 plugs before, when we were only talking about Category 3 (10 Mbps). The RJ45 plugs themselves have to be classified as Category 5 as well to be guaranteed to carry 100 Mbps. Later versions of Cat5 will handle ten times that (1000 Mbps or 1 Gbps (Gigabit per second)

-- Don Armstrong (darmst@yahoo.com.au), September 11, 2001.