TIL the Ethernet cable in my office wall was Cat3 the whole time

Been fighting slow speeds on the office file server for months. Blamed the switch, blamed the router, even blamed the server itself. Finally got curious and pulled the wall plate off last Tuesday. That cable says Cat3 on it, not even Cat5. This building is from the 90s so it makes sense, but nobody ever checked. We get maybe 10 Mbps on a gigabit network because of this one stupid cable. Ran a new Cat6 through the drop ceiling in an afternoon, now we're at 900+. Has anyone else found ancient cabling hiding in walls or ceilings that was silently bottlenecking everything?

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the_jesse18d ago

Wait, Cat3? Like, the stuff that was already outdated when dial-up was still a thing? That's wild. I once found a single run of 10BASE-T coax in a ceiling tile at my old place, thought I was losing my mind. It was all wrapped up in this weird oily cloth stuff. Props to you for actually pulling the plate and checking, most people would just keep blaming the router and buy a new one that doesn't fix anything.