[ale] Cat-5 question

Sean Kilpatrick drifter at oppositelock.org
Mon Apr 10 10:41:28 EDT 2006


This has been a useful thread -- at least for me.
Some of the things I have learned:

* The most useful piece of data was the code name "568B."
Googling on that got me to pages that showed me how to
actually wire the plugs. That and Jim's patient explanation
of how to get the wires lined up _before_ pushing them into
the plug.

* If I had to do it all over again I would undoubtedly use
wall jacks, but when I started down this path (on a sunny
day with the birds chirping) I only needed to string one
piece of wire from the basement home of the router upstairs
to my wife's computer.

* The four pairs of wires are twisted at different rates. I
don't know that I would have noticed if it hadn't been
pointed out to me.

* These days most CAt-5 cable uses stranded wire, but solid wire
cables do exist and the rj-45 jacks are different for each -- not
that I would have been able to tell the difference.

And all of this is because my son was willing to buy us a wireless
router so he could use his laptop when visiting.  Turned out
there were two problems:

1.  This house, built in 1951, has gypsum wall board as the first
layer on the walls, covered by a half inch of course plaster hung
on an expanded wire lath. This is a bad environment for radio
waves. :) So, to make the wireless router work the DSL box and the
wireless router were moved from the basement to the main deck and
the single cable, previously run, now connected the wireless router
to my computer downstairs.

2.  The unexpected "Oops!" was that the telephone wire feeding my
wife's office works fine for voice but degraded the DSL signal badly.
I can't complain as it _is_ 55-year-old telephone wire.

3.  The solution was to move the DSL box back downstairs where it
gets a telephone feed on clean wire only a few feet from the external
telephone service feed. Now I could have also moved the wireless
router back downstairs but, hating to waste money, I didn't want to
spend a hundred bucks on a wireless repeater and have to hang it at the
top of the stairwell leading to the basement.

In my innocence I thought I could just run a second piece of Cat-5
cable from the router back downstairs to the DSL box.  It seemed so
simple.  NOT.  In retrospect it would have been _much_ simpler to run
a new piece of telephone wire from the main junction block inside the
house up to my wife's office. That, more than likely, would have solved
the problem with minimal expense and labor.

Live and learn.

For those reading this who may not know any more about Cat-5 cable 
than I do, I can offer two web sites that were useful:

http://www.duxcw.com/digest/Howto/network/cable/cable5.htm

http://www.lanshack.com/make-cat5e.aspx

Sean,
  who is very thankful to all who helped me solve this problem.

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