CAT5e Plenum Cable was introduced in 1998 which turned out to be one of the major introductions in Category series paving a pathway for the next generation of augmented twisted pair cabling commonly known as Category 6a Plenum cable.


1998’s famous introduction, Category 5e Plenum Cable, came with the specifications of 1 gigabyte of speed which could travel over the course of 100 meters and a better frequency of that time that provided a performance of up to 250 MHz. This introduction turned out to be a mega success and became a major selling point.


Diving deep into the generational talk of networking cables without knowing the jacket type isn’t a much worthy experience. In the current scenario, Plenum is the jacket type of these networking cables. The word Plenum comes from the Plenum space concept, a concept which revolves around those heat spaces of the building such as air vents.


These spaces are the zone of heat and can not only damage the cable but also burn it hence producing toxic gasses and visible smoke. This jacket type was introduced to deal with this problem which has fire strict properties, leading to help in protecting the cable from burning. Because of this reason, the plenum spaces always use plenum cables and also the reason why plenum cables can replace non-plenum cables but it's vice-versa isn’t true.


In order to find the perfect networking cable, the jacket type plays an important part as well as knowing the specific cable and its specifications. The specifications of CAT6a Plenum Cable, introduced in 2002, includes a massive up gradation of faster speed i.e. 10 gigs which can travel over a course of 100 meters and a better frequency of up to 850 MHz.


Seeing the specifications of Category 6’s augmented plenum we understand that it was a massive improvement on the lines of better performance and faster speed. With the generational gap and a need for faster and better networking cables, it is easy to deduce that this was a big up gradation.


CAT6a Plenum Cable is better than Category 5e Plenum Cable because of faster speed and better performance have changed but this isn’t all, there’s much more to the story. With better specifications, comes better usage. With fast speed, you can stream and transfer data in a shorter time and hence you can do so much more.