Every few weeks someone asks us whether they should pay extra for Cat6A. It usually comes up during a renovation or a new build, when the walls are open and the decision feels permanent. The honest answer is that Cat6 is still fine for most homes, and Cat6A is worth it in a handful of specific situations. Here is how we think it through on real jobs.
What each cable actually does
Cat6 is certified for 10 gigabit up to about 55 metres, and for 1 gigabit and 2.5 gigabit at the full 100 metres. In a typical house, almost no run exceeds 55 metres, so Cat6 will quietly carry 10G to most rooms if you ever need it.
Cat6A is certified for 10 gigabit at the full 100 metres. It has heavier conductors, tighter twists, and usually better shielding against interference between pairs. The cable is thicker and stiffer, which matters more than people expect when you are stuffing six runs through a joist bay.
On paper that sounds like a small difference. In practice, the "up to 55 metres" caveat on Cat6 covers the vast majority of residential and small office runs. We measure long runs when we quote a job, and it is rare to see anything past 60 metres outside of large commercial buildings, barns, and detached shops.
The speeds you will actually use
Most internet plans in our area top out between 1 and 3 gigabit. Most devices ship with 1 gigabit or 2.5 gigabit ports. A Cat6 run handles all of that with room to spare.
Where 10G shows up today is between specific devices: a NAS and an editing workstation, a server and a switch, camera recorders with a lot of streams. Those links are usually short and usually in the same room or closet. Cat6 covers them too.
So if you are asking "will Cat6 be slow," the answer is no. The question is really about headroom fifteen or twenty years from now, because pulling cable is cheap when the walls are open and expensive forever after.
PoE headroom is the quiet argument for 6A
Power over Ethernet is the part of this comparison people skip, and it is the one we care about most. Cameras, access points, door controllers, and intercoms all run on PoE now, and power levels keep creeping up.
Thicker copper means less resistance, which means less power lost as heat over the run. On a long pull to a high-draw device (a PTZ camera at the far corner of a property, an access point in a detached garage), Cat6A delivers noticeably more usable power at the far end. It also runs cooler in bundles, which matters when twenty PoE runs share one conduit.
If your plan involves a lot of PoE devices at the edges of the property, that alone can justify 6A for those specific runs, even if the rest of the house gets Cat6. We covered why wired access points beat mesh in an earlier post, and every one of those wired APs is a PoE run that benefits from good copper.
What the cost difference really looks like
Ignore the sticker price of a box of cable, because the cable is the small part of a structured wiring job. Labour, terminations, patch panels, and testing make up most of the bill.
As a rough rule, going from Cat6 to Cat6A adds somewhere around 20 to 40 percent to the cabling portion of a project. The cable costs more, the jacks and panels cost more, and the stiffer cable takes longer to pull and terminate cleanly. On a whole-home job that might mean a few hundred dollars of difference, not thousands.
That percentage is why our advice splits by situation. On a retrofit where you are pulling four runs to fix Wi-Fi dead spots, the premium buys you very little. On a new build where the drywall is not up yet, the premium is a small fraction of the project and you will never get a cheaper chance to install the better cable.
Our rule of thumb
Run Cat6A when any of these apply: it is a new build or gut renovation, the run is long (anything approaching 55 metres or beyond), the run feeds a high-power PoE device, or you genuinely expect 10G to that location. Multi-unit buildings and commercial spaces with big cable bundles also lean 6A for the heat and interference behaviour.
Run Cat6 when you are retrofitting a typical house, the runs are short, and the endpoints are TVs, desks, consoles, and ordinary access points. It is not a compromise. It is the right tool.
Either way, insist on solid copper cable (never copper-clad aluminum), proper terminations, and a test report for every run. A badly terminated Cat6A run performs worse than a clean Cat6 one, and we see that on service calls more often than we would like.
If you are planning a build or renovation and want the low-voltage side designed once and done right, we design and install structured wiring across Norfolk County and the surrounding region. Get in touch before the drywall goes up and we will help you decide, run by run, which cable earns its keep.
Cabling, networks, cameras, access control, smart homes, hosting and software for homes and small business across Southwestern Ontario. Twenty-plus years in the trade, and we still answer the phone.