Category 3 Cable - Networking

Networking

Cat 3 was used in computer networking in the early 1990s for 10BASE-T Ethernet, token ring, or ATM25 networks. The seldom used 100BASE-T4 standard, which achieves speeds of 100 Mbit/s by using all 4 pairs of wires, allowed older Category 3 based infrastructures to achieve a much higher bandwidth. but fell out of popularity in favor of the very similar, but higher performing, Category 5 cable standard. Since the early 2000s most new structured cable installations are built with Category 5e or Category 6 cable.

The original Power over Ethernet specification supports category 3 cable though it is not supported in the new 802.3at Type 2 high-power variation.