I have yet to find a single compliant CAT 7/a cable anywhere but from industrial suppliers. It's been 15 years, can we get consumer grade 10Gig already? Or even just "multigig" devices below the $200 mark?
2024 is very silly. Games are now 100 GB, require 12 gigs of VRAM, and you need a $5,000 home network infrastructure unless you wanna be stuck in the world of neo-dialup speeds.
I can't even find pure copper CAT 5/6 cables anymore, they're all copper-clad aluminum which is great for the price but not great for longer runs. Last two "100% copper" cables I bought were not pure copper when I sliced them open and was able to strip some of the copper coating off.
Honestly, I'm just sticking with 6a cables for now as I plan to move in the near future. Gonna just put in some conduit and go optical for all the longish runs.
It's not actually that expensive to network two computers with 10GbE:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07VC9T3WQ
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B09M8C4R1D
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0BGMZPL4ZUsed these to connect my PC to a custom 10GbE NAS running TrueNAS. (Finding OCuLink cables for the NAS drives, though, that was a trick).
I haven't used wired ethernet in so long I didn't realize we weren't still on Cat6.
Where pushing full Poe+ power, control and 4k video through a single cat6 cable at work. Outside of very niche use cases do people really need anything beyond 6?
Maybe not now, no.
On the other hand, I remember people debating on forums and newsgroups 20 years ago whether 1000 Mbps Ethernet was "overkill" for home networks, because Internet connections didn't even come close to being that fast.
