The 328-foot line

That odd number is 100 meters, the distance a rated Ethernet speed can travel reliably. Installers use it to budget for signal loss, interference and timing drift.

“An Ethernet cable won't always work perfectly at 328 feet and drop off into oblivion at 329 feet.”

It is not all cable

The 328 feet covers the whole run. A typical setup is 295 feet of solid-core cable in the walls plus up to 33 feet of flexible patch cable at each end.

Your 50-foot cable is fine

A 10, 25 or 100-foot run on solid Cat5e or Cat6 carries a full gigabit without breaking a sweat. Length only starts to matter once you push past gigabit.

Category beats distance

Cat5e and Cat6 both do 1 Gbps for the full 328 feet. Cat6a does 10 Gbps for the full 328 feet. Cat1 through Cat4 are phone-line relics you can ignore.

Cat6 is the trap

Cat6 can run 10GBASE-T, but only to about 180 feet. Past that you get errors and flaky throughput, and the fix is Cat6a, which sustains 10 Gbps to the full 328.

“As you can see, Cat6 can catch you off guard.”

Don't buy more than you need

If your ISP plan tops out at 1 Gbps, Cat8 buys you nothing. Your router ports and your computer have to support the speed too.

“That would be like purchasing an Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 so you can play Roblox.”

Going past 328 feet

Drop a switch at the midpoint to split it into two copper runs, or swap the long stretch for fiber with a media converter. For Power over Ethernet, check that a long run still delivers enough power.