Ethernet Wiring Advice
Posted in Geeky by Dan at 10:51 am
This post was published 1 year 9 months 6 days ago and its content may not be valid anymore.Ok Uneasy’s have a question for you. I’m in the middle of an ambitious wiring project with Cat 6 ethernet cable. I’m using a patch board and standard wall terminators, which have an A & B relationship.
My understanding is residential wiring calls for both the wall terminal and patch pannel to be wired using the A relationship.
After punchdowns, I still have no connectivity. My switch, when patched in, shows link lights for connected hardware. Also, all runs are far shorter then the maximum lengh. All wires and hardware is Belkin and highly shielded. Short of me running out and buying a tester anybody see an error of my understanding proper cabling techniques?
This post may self destruct.
what kind of cables are you using from the jack to the computer/device ?
I have always used the “B” spec in punch downs.
I have cat 6 straight through patch cables.
I was in a good debate with someone over using A or B and I ultimately went with A… But to quote my friend, it honestly doesn’t matter as long as it is the same at both ends.
When I ran my house with Cat 6 and a patch board (heck I even have an old Merlin phone system hooked up — I can call the other phones in my house — kinda nerdy really) I always used the B convention. It really won’t matter though which you use, as long as you are ALWAYS consistent at both ends of the cable.
If you’re having trouble like you said, you can pick up a tester for around $30 bucks. One of the issues that can be common with wall jack punching is if one of your pairs got double-punched. IE, one of your wires got punched into it’s own slot, as well as it’s neighbors. The only way to really figure this out beyond a magnifying glass and a lot of time is with a testing unit.
I’ve always used the B standard. According to Wikipedia, the A standard is now obsolete. Like Dan said, it doesn’t matter as long as everything is the same.
I vote Powerline. ;)
Ill give you the nod Dave
http://www.slingmedia.com/go/slt4
:)
Dude, I NEED my gigabit!
@PVL Figures I wire the whole damn house to A :P.. But it honestly doesn’t matter.
The “B” side has always been the side I have used, and I have been running cable for 10 years now.
So, you are going from your belkin switch to a patch panel to the cable, to a female cat6 wall jack, to a patch cable. The only problems I could see (if all of them are not working) is that either they are punched down wrong or you have a bad switch.
Also, with Cat6, you can not split the lines….meaning that you can’t take 4 of the wires to one computer and the other 4 to another computer or phone.
You could get away with that with Cat5, but the Cat6 hardware has to use all 4 pairs of wires.
You say you have no connectivity but what exactly does that mean ? What test is failing to cause you to assert there is no connectivity. If you have link lights on the switch, something is happening !
If you were closer, I’d lend you my Fluke.
Honestly, I’ve always outsourced my wiring needs for business, and relied either on wireless or Sling’s powerline thingy, so I can’t offer any true advice. But yes, the wiring at work is all B spec.
If your in wall wiring is A and your cables which go from computer to wall are B then you won’t get connectivity. Go ahead and buy a tester but I’m sure you’ll find that when you test from punch down to wall jack you’ll pass and your computer to wall jack cables will pass but you still won’t get connectivity from computer to punch down since the orange and green pairs are swapped. It’ll be a pain but I would re-punch everything as B. I’m pretty sure the majority of pre-made ethernet cables are B anyway.
It’s not enough that they are the same in both ends, you need to go
pair, single pair, single, pair
I’ve done commercial cabling for a living and I can tell you that the most common reason you’ll see these problems are that the cables were stretched or torn somewhere in the wall, they weren’t terminated “punched down” properly, or that they were stripped from the main bundle too far back prior to terminating meaning that there is some un-shielded cable visible coming out of the back of the jack. Make sure that the wires aren’t stretched and cut the ends as short as possible before punching them down and they should be fine. Sometimes those jacks are defective too so changing them out won’t hurt either.
Also, make sure the patch-panel you have is Cat 6 compliant, occasionally you could find one that doesn’t like Cat6. Also, similar to what BLAH said above, if you are using any “twist ties” or anything like that, make sure you don’t have them super tight. Ethernet cables are terrible when it comes to pinching/stretching, bending, and will fuss at too much force.