This has become a continuing source of confusion for many in the IT world. As the price for Gigabit Ethernet Switches continue to drop, most customer are purchasing these products for their networks, and why not? Gigabit (1000BaseT) is 10X faster than the older established 100Megabit (100BaseT) components. The problem in many instances the installed cabling system is Category 5e or older and was never intended to support network speeds faster than 100Megabit. Gigabit applications were designed to run on Category 6 cable which is the only cable ratified by the EIA/TIA.

As a result of running Gigabit on older generations of cable, we receive calls on a regular basis from clients having connectivity issues and slow response as the error rate climbs due to failed data packets. The easy solution is to re-cable, but we have advised customers that they can configure the switch for 100BaseTwhich will resolve the problem, but defeats the purpose of purchasing a Gigabit Switch.