Category-3

Definition
Category-3 cable (commonly known as Cat 3 or station wire is an unshielded twisted pair (UTP) cable designed to reliably carry data up to 10 Mbit/s, with a possible bandwidth of 16 MHz. It is part of a family of copper cabling standards defined jointly by the Electronic Industries Alliance and the Telecommunications Industry Association.

Overview
Category-3 was a popular cabling format among computer network administrators in the early 1990s, 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 Cat-5e or Cat-6 cable.