Category 3 cable


Category 3 cable, commonly known as or station wire, and less commonly known as VG or voice-grade, is an unshielded twisted pair cable used in telephone wiring. It is part of a family of standards defined jointly by the Electronic Industries Alliance and the Telecommunications Industry Association and published in TIA/EIA-568-B.
Although designed to reliably carry data up to 10 Mbit/s, modern data networks run at much higher speeds, and or better cable is generally used for new installations.

Networking

was widely used in computer networking in the early 1990s for 10BASE-T Ethernet and, to a lesser extent, for 100BaseVG Ethernet, token ring and 100BASE-T4. The original Power over Ethernet 802.3af specification supports the use of cable, but the later 802.3at Type 2 high-power variation does not.

Replacement

Starting in the mid-1990s, new structured cabling installations were almost invariably built with the higher performing cable required by 100BASE-TX. or is now used for all modern structured cabling installations. Many large institutions have policies that any upgrade to a network using must involve upgrading to.