Is cat5 cable UTP or STP?

Question

Is cat5 cable UTP or STP?

Answer 1

You can get Cat5 in both UTP abd STP. STP was usually used in electrically noisy environments, such as some industrial plants. Otherwise, most cat5 installations are just UTP.

Answer 2

You'll get no benefit from STP in an Ethernet environment unless you're doing short copper runs of 10GB Ethernet (where it's required). The only time that I've ever used STP was an old Token Ring installation at an IBM facility many years ago.



In fact, with standard 568A/B cabling there's no way to properly ground the shielding, which could case significant degradation in performance using STP.

Answer 3

By default it's UTP. STP is more expensive and almost always needs to be requested.