rootninja

Technical

The Category 5e standard guarantees performance of attenuation, return loss, propagation delay, delay skew, NEXT, Power-sum NEXT, ACR, power-sum ACR, ELFEXT, and power-sum ELFEXT to a nominal range of values at 100 MHz. The Category 6 standard guarantees to 250mhz.

Gigabit Ethernet works just fine on Cat5e.

Category 5e and Category 6 cables both support up to and including Gigabit Ethernet, 10/100/1000 speeds. If you want to support higher than 1000Base-T in the future, get cat6.

Standards

And remember, these are only standards that say all equipment rated CatX will support up to Y performance. How well the cables are manufactured and terminated will determine the actual bandwidth your cables will support. If you had the test gear, you may probe a 5e cable and find that it’s good up to 300mhz or more. Some manufacturers rate their cables to much higher frequencies but this does not guarantee any gains in performance.

IEEE 802.ab

IEEE 802.3ab, ratified in 1999, defines gigabit Ethernet transmission over unshielded twisted pair (UTP) category 5, 5e, or 6 cabling and became known as 1000BASE-T. With the ratification of 802.3ab, gigabit Ethernet became a desktop technology as organizations could use their existing copper cabling infrastructure.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gigabit_Ethernet

How much do you want to spend?

If money isn’t a factor, run cat6 or fiber, and run multiple cables at a time. Get fancy punch down terminals and build a wiring closet with fancy lighting. And pay a high end home theater company to do it all for you.

The Bottom Line

Cat6 is more expensive and doesn’t get you any improvement right now unless you’re running 10Gbase-T hardware. Cat5e are easy to make. Just get a spool, a crimper tool, and some rj45 jacks.

The only benefit to going with higher than 10 Gigabit speeds in your apartment or home would be on your LAN between devices like a router, laptop, file server, etc. If you’re hosting movie files on one computer and watching them on another, you’ll utilize the added performance of your high speed connection and 10/100/1000 should last for years to come.

But with that said, If you’re having a home built and they’re running cat5e cable, it’s going to be a pain to rerun cat6 or better in the future. They staple the cables against framing, so you’re really going to have a hard time removing that stuff once the house is built.