CATEGORY FIVE...

[cjkline83.livejournal.com]

Its not that hard, is it? You hire an electrician to do your wiring for a new business you're opening up, and you ask us, your POS dealer, what kind of cable to run for your communication lines. We advise you to run CAT-5 cable. Its an industry standard. Has been since right after the days of Thin Net and 10Base Cat 3.

So, why then, would your electrician ask you to ask us HOW MANY CONDUCTORS WE NEED IN THE CAT 5 CABLE?

Here, let me make it simple.

all of them

.

I then proceed to read from Wikipedia about category five cable and he takes notes...
Four twisted pair, eight conductor cable in the following color pairs:
White Blue/Blue
White Orange/Orange
White Green/Green
White Blue/Blue

*groan*

Comments

[kizayaen.livejournal.com]

Oh lawdy. Iz dat sum homemade cat5?

[agmlego.livejournal.com]

You mean...

...you want all of them wires connected‽ </sarcasm>

--
"Memento Mori Ergo Carpe Diem"

[kgasso.livejournal.com]

Taking all bets... my money's on the electrician showing up with home-made 14ga. cable in varying colors twisted up with the help of a power drill. :)

[penguindreamz.livejournal.com]

Dear customer-
Please keep 911 or the local fire department on speed dial. I think you may be needing it.

[jecook]

You have my condolences.

the last place I was at, we had the electricians run all the network cable.

Worst cable job I've ever seen- the cable was draped on the ceiling instead of in trays, the server room side of it was no in conduit, and there were about ten different brands of cable used, including some oddball variety that I've never seen before that had two extra pairs.

And then when they fired me and had their telco vendor come in to finish it, their techs were least seen cussing up a storm over the sparkies.

[snyperwolf.livejournal.com]

The problem here is hiring an electrician to run cat5.

Hire any intelligent 8 year old kid on the street, train them for 5 minutes, and they can terminate cat5.

[zercool.livejournal.com]

Hm, my Cat5 all is:
White Blue/Blue
White Orange/Orange
White Green/Green
White Brown/Brown

Should I be worried? ;)

[zercool.livejournal.com]

14ga? Have you seen the price of copper lately? I'd bet on 18ga at best.

[ravenshrinkery.livejournal.com]

I'd like to see in either case how they do the crimping jobs.

[lihan161051.livejournal.com]

They may be trying to cheap out on the cable, thinking that 10/100BaseT only uses 2 pairs (and I've seen cable that only has 2 pairs in it used for LAN connections in cheap cable pulls). They may be trying to patch it through punchdown blocks or something insane like that and not use space on the blocks for all 4 pairs, or they may be trying to lowball bid with cheap cable, or both.

(I was working in a building where that had been done for the original LAN cable installation, and it took them about a year and a LOT of re-cabling to undo the mess. The original cabling worked great for 10BaseT but completely broke 100BaseT.)

[cjkline83.livejournal.com]

Hmm... that's weird.

Mine is all
White Blue
Blue
White Orange
Green
White Green
Orange
White Brown
Brown.

[ravenshrinkery.livejournal.com]

It's been quite reasonable for years to expect Cat5e to be installed to ensure GbE can be used as the company upgrades its backbone. Anyone who insisted on anything less should be drawn and quartered and the limbs posted in the server room as a reminder to trust your IT guys.

[lihan161051.livejournal.com]

An appropriate punishment, to be sure.

(hell, my *house* is cabled to that standard .. :)

[lihan161051.livejournal.com]

568A pairing should be:

1: white/green (3-)
2: green (3+)
3: white/orange (2-)
4: blue (1+)
5: white/blue (1-)
6: orange (2+)
7: white/brown (4-)
8: brown (4+)

568A vs. 568B doesn't matter much, as long as both ends of the cable are paired the same. (568B swaps the green pair and the orange pair, same polarity. The commercially made patch cables I've seen have been a random mix of 568A and 568B pairings, they all work fine.) 10/100 uses pairs 2 and 3, if I remember correctly (hence previous remark about 10/100 cabling and really cheap patch cables sometimes being cheaped out with 2 pair connectivity on just those pairs).

[lihan161051.livejournal.com]

Wait a second .. they put the *blue* pair on 1 and 2, and the *green* pair on 4 and 5? That's weird .. although I've seen it in some of the cheaper offshore ones. Doesn't really matter, as long as the pairs go 5-4, 6-3, 1-2, 7-8, and connect straight through. It just looks weird to people who terminate their own cables, like me .. LOL

[lihan161051.livejournal.com]

d'oh! 5-4, 3-6, 1-2, 7-8 .. polarity matters .. lol

[lihan161051.livejournal.com]

And the problem with the electricians is that they think in terms of 10 to 14 gauge Romex and high voltage wiring, and they don't understand loop circuit signal wiring, much less UTP ..

[cjkline83.livejournal.com]

You can blame my first IT boss at the School District.

He tought us the acronym "Big Old Gay Boy".

I'm not sure what his motives were... but that's why I cable all my ends like that... BLUE, ORANGE, GREEN, BROWN.

[zercool.livejournal.com]

I wasn't commenting on the ordering, only the colors in use...

[tjernobyl.livejournal.com]

Heck, if you paint 1000baseT, it can mess with the capacitance enough to make it fail...

[mirar.livejournal.com]

Don't you really want Cat6a if you do new cabling today? For the 10GbaseT you'll use in a few years.

[taleya.livejournal.com]

Mine's like a big gay rainbow! *sparkle*

[trixtah.livejournal.com]

Yep.

Also, I'd bloody cancel the arrangement I had with the electrician if he came back with that kind of question. Is there no concern about the quality of work he'll carry out?