Well does it? From what I am reading not really, I would just like to use normal Cat 5e or Cat 6, any suggestions? Cheers
Except the cables that come with xboxes. They have 4 pins missing. TL;DR: You need all 8 pins wired correctly for POE to work.
Other alternatives... These guys make quite a few elegant solutions for providing power to both PoE and non-PoE devices over Cat-5 cabling: http://www.panoptictechnology.com/network-smart-adapters/
But it would (probably) be cheaper to just get a cable that wasn't made wrong -.- That is of course unless that cables goes in impossible to get at places.
cat5=cat6 for price on any decent reseller so get the cat6. got 30 meters of cat6 for £14 on ebuyer.com a while back
it doesnt have the same price. we use it everyday at work and buy 305m reels and i can tell you that its more expensive its at least 40% more sometimes depending where you buy it from can be 100% more EDIT - also 30m of Cat6 for £14 is expensive 46p/metre !!!! The cat5 we use is around 15-20p/metre
As many have said, Power-over-Ethernet just requires a Cat5e cable, with all 8 cores available. For the most part, this limits you to 100Mbit on most devices -- Gigabit requires the other 4 cores to sustain such speeds. There are implementations that can provide power over Gigabit Ethernet, but they're typically rarer/more expensive, from what I can see. Caveat: 'back in the day' not all manufacturers behaved appropriately with their POE specifications, ignoring any standards and just doing it their own way. Cisco in particular. They've since gotten better, but you might find some older kit is a bit barmy. Sometimes this can be resolved with a little bit of re-organisation on the cores, sometimes your switch just won't be providing the right voltage or whatever. But largely, there's nothing special to it. At least not these days.
