identifying the cable. (1st step on designing)

this is the first step on design IT structure, so what cable are we going to use?
there are different king of cable that we should know if we going to use CAT 3, CAT5, CAT6 or CAT7, CAT means category.

Category 3 cable, commonly known as Cat 3 or station wire, and less commonly known as VG or Voice-grade (as, for example, in 100BaseVG), is an unshielded twisted pair(UTP) cable used in telephone wiring.

Category 5 cable (cat 5) is a twisted pair cable for carrying signals. This type of cable is used in structured cabling forcomputer networks such as Ethernet. The cable standard provides performance of up to 100 MHz and is suitable for10BASE-T, 100BASE-TX (Fast Ethernet), and 1000BASE-T (Gigabit Ethernet). Cat 5 is also used to carry other signals such as telephony and video.

Category 6 cable, commonly referred to as Cat 6, is a standardized cable for Gigabit Ethernet and other network physical layers that is backward compatible with the Category 5/5e and Category 3 cable standards.^[1] Compared with Cat 5 and Cat 5e, Cat 6 features more stringent specifications for crosstalk and system noise.^[1] The cable standard provides performance of up to 250 MHz and is suitable for 10BASE-T, 100BASE-TX (Fast Ethernet), 1000BASE-T/1000BASE-TX (Gigabit Ethernet) and 10GBASE-T (10-Gigabit Ethernet).^[1]

Category 7 cable (Cat7), (ISO/IEC 11801:2002 category 7/class F), is a cable standard for Ethernet and other interconnect technologies. CAT 7 is backwards compatible with traditional Cat5 and Cat6 Ethernet. Cat7 features even more strict specifications for crosstalk and system noise than Cat6. Shielding has been added for individual wire pairs on the Category 7 cable.


so what? what im going to use?
well as we also talking about the budget + future proofing we have to ask the budget or propose the highest one, the CAT 7 were it is also compatible backward on CAT6 and CAT 5 but note: as technology today CAT  7 is actually super promising speed, but we never know the feature 15 years more if we needing the CAT 7 speed. or budget wise go for CAT 6 which i believe CAT6e can accommodate the technology 15 years more. and remember this DO NOT propose CAT5 which is sooner or late this ill become obsolete.