Category 2 cable, also known as Cat 2, is a grade of

unshielded twisted pair Twisted pair cabling is a type of communications cable in which two conductors of a single Electronic circuit, circuit are twisted together for the purposes of improving electromagnetic compatibility. Compared to a Single-ended signaling, sin ...

cabling designed for

telephone A telephone, colloquially referred to as a phone, is a telecommunications device that enables two or more users to conduct a conversation when they are too far apart to be easily heard directly. A telephone converts sound, typically and most ...

and data communications. The maximum frequency suitable for transmission over Cat 2 cable is 4 MHz, and the maximum

bandwidth Bandwidth commonly refers to: * Bandwidth (signal processing) or ''analog bandwidth'', ''frequency bandwidth'', or ''radio bandwidth'', a measure of the width of a frequency range * Bandwidth (computing), the rate of data transfer, bit rate or thr ...

is 4 Mbit/s. Cat 2 cable contains 4 pairs of wires, or 8 wires total. Official

TIA/EIA-568 ANSI/TIA-568 is a technical standard for commercial building cabling for telecommunications products and services. The title of the standard is ''Commercial Building Telecommunications Cabling Standard'' and is published by the Telecommunications I ...

standards have only been established for cables of Category 3 ratings or above. Though not an official category standard established by TIA/EIA, Category 2 has become the de facto name given to Level 2 cables originally defined by

Anixter International Anixter International Inc. is a company based in Glenview, Illinois, United States and founded in 1957. The company supplies goods and services for communications, security, networking, audio-visual, and industrial control applications. The com ...

, the distributor. Anixter ''Level 2'' cable was frequently used on

ARCnet Attached Resource Computer NETwork (ARCNET or ARCnet) is a communications protocol for local area networks. ARCNET was the first widely available networking system for microcomputers and it became popular in the 1980s for office automation task ...

and 4 Mbit/s

Token Ring Token Ring is a Physical layer, physical and data link layer computer networking technology used to build local area networks. It was introduced by IBM in 1984, and standardized in 1989 as IEEE Standards Association, IEEE 802.5. It uses a sp ...

networks, it is also used in telephone networks but it is no longer commonly used.

References

{{UTP Cable Standards Networking hardware Signal cables