The spec for CAT5 is 100 meters which is around 330ft. Someone mentioned
seeing greater distances, and I have too, but I have also seen shorter runs
that were noting but trouble. It's all in the installation.

For the longer runs, the user didn't know any better, but the analyzer that
we put on showed an unusually high number of retransmits. One in particular
was "only" 380 ft and the retransmit rate was about 1 frame in 10. Most of
the runs that were over 300ft also had high retransmits, but this one was
the worst. A couple of years later we removed all of that cabling and had
an entire new CAT5 cable plant installed (CAT5e and CAT6 were not available
at that time).

For the shorter runs, I remember one run of only about 240 ft was so bad
that it was unuseable. This was in the brand new cable plant mentioned
about. When the cable installer ran a new cable he found that he had been
running next to some other cabling that had power among other things (for
about 30ft). I seem to remember him saying that there was 110v, 220v, and
408v power line all together but I could be wring on that. He also found
that the original cable had two kinks in it. No broken wires or anything,
but kinks are bad. Both of the kinks were in an area that was very
difficult to get wire into (and out of). Fortunately, we had a good
installer and this was corrected before being brought into service. He
actually re-routed the entire cable bundle (about 50 cables).

Wayne


"Ivan Vegvary" wrote in message
...
Well the real question is that I want to add a computer to my shop.
Wanting
to network it to the house computer and the internet, I would need about
100-120 feet of cable. Are there any problems placing computer that far
apart? The longest distance I have in the house is 34 feet using Cat 5
cable. Can I go 120 feet?

Any suggestions or recommendations would be appreciated. BTW I do also
have
a wireless router for my wife's laptop. She is able to get about 30 feet
away and then loses signal. Maybe there are better routers?

Thanks, Ivan Vegvary