This isn't a "wireless" question, but I've enjoyed the knowledgeable help from this group before.
I need to connect two LANs about 500 feet apart with some flavor of cable. A wireless bridge is not an option, unfortunatley. I've got a couple of 100baseFX fiber switches, a big roll of fiber, and some SC type terminators, but I'd really rather avoid using them since a) the cable run is outdoors, I can't bury it ... damage is inevitable b) terminating fiber isn't as trivial as crimping RJ45 plugs
I know that the official distance that CAT5e can run is 100 meters; to read some web sites, you'd think that an attempt to go 101 meters would be a catastrophic failure. Some imply that to violate the natural order of things by running it further is to invite divine retribution.
But surely CAT5e can go more than 100 meters? Perhaps at reduced speed? I don't need 100 mbps; 10 mbps would be fine as the bottleneck is a shared 1 mbps internet connection. If ~150 meters is OK, but at
10 mbps, will my dumb 10/100 autosensing switches be smart enough to fall back on the slower speed? Would I be better off using a new high quality 10/100 switch that tries to make 100 mbps work, or an older 10 mbps only switch that forces the connection to the slower speed?Just looking for some references or personal experiences on running CAT5e further than it's supposed to go, because I don't want to mess with fiber. Thanks.