Ethernet Woes

[Mul]

Hi folks,

So my parent's home is being extended and some rooms are being wired with CAT6. Today the electrician had finished the wiring but none of our devices are acknowledging a connection.

Just to give you all an idea of what's going on, the CAT6 cables are supposed to run from our Infinity Home Hub and into a RJ45 wall plate. Cables then run from behind said wall plate and to each respective room. Those cables are terminated with wall plates as well.

To be precise my question relates to the T568 A and T568 B wiring standards. All of the internal ethernet leads have been terminated with the "A" configuration, however all of my patch leads are of the "B" standard. I was even willing to part £ROFL at a high street shop for some new CAT6 patch leads but they were all of "B" type as well.

So in a nutshell, is this the source of my problem? I did some googling but received mixed feedback.

Any advice would be appreciated. Thanks!

 

[bitslice]

T568A is what is recommend for new installs,
electrically they are they same

If he's installing it as Cat6, ask him to prove the link is actually to cat6 spec and not hashed together with wet string.

Go back to basics and prove your kit still works with a few patch cables

 

[Mul]

Thanks for the feedback. So if I'm not getting any life out of the wiring, I guess there's a more fundamental problem?

 

[Coldzero]

Guess you don't have a cable tester?

 

[PhillyDee]

Anywhere near me? I have a good cable tester that will tell you what and where is wrong.

The wiring standard means nothing as long as both ends are the same.

 

[Mul]

Guess you don't have a cable tester?

Sadly not; we've relied mostly on WiFi in the past. I was here for just a weekend and perhaps I was naive to think that the installation would be a straight forward procedure and that there was a low chance of a fault. Hindsight is always 20:20 but with so little time to play with I probably should've just got a tester.

T568A is what is recommend for new installs,
electrically they are they same

If he's installing it as Cat6, ask him to prove the link is actually to cat6 spec and not hashed together with wet string.

Go back to basics and prove your kit still works with a few patch cables

Sorry, I missed your edit. I have confirmed that my router and cables work fine.

As for the cabling, I found the drum earlier; it was labelled as JETLAN6+ Category 6. I presume that this should do the job?

Anywhere near me? I have a good cable tester that will tell you what and where is wrong.

The wiring standard means nothing as long as both ends are the same.

That's very kind of you to offer but I have ran out of time and left home. Thanks for confirming what I thought about the cabling.

Edit - But actually, can a wall socket even be considered as an end? Surely a wall port is more like a coupler/extender so by doing a --> a (wall) coupled with b-->b is the same as a--b? Perhaps the rule of mixing standards assumes that some sort of auto sensing device lies in between?

I suppose I just wanted to double check that there was no other possible external factor to consider. Just a case of calling back the electrician to get it sorted...

 

[bitslice]

As for the cabling, I found the drum earlier; it was labelled as JETLAN6+ Category 6. I presume that this should do the job?

The installation/material requirements for Cat6 are tighter, the pair twists must be right up to the crimp, you can't use cable ties to bundle etc.
Cat6 is tested at 250Mhz, Cat5 only has to go to 100Mhz

Ideally he should test each run for attenuation, return loss and NE/FE crosstalk, otherwise you are dependant on him to have got every detail right and hope every core insertion was perfect. Anybody can install Cat5, but you need to be a bit finicky to get Cat6 perfect, that's why it has to be tested afterwards.

In practice, I've never seen a crap installation not actually work, even ones where they have mixed up the pair returns and the crosstalk must have been hideous. At worst each end will auto-negotiate down to 10Mb/s and will still communicate over a snot trail.

Were you getting any link lights on the switch at all?


Off the top of my head, I think if you loop one switch port through the wall wiring, to an adjacent switch port and then add some traffic, the switch will go mad and light up.
You avoid this in practice, but it might prove a physical link without a tester handy

 

[PhillyDee]

It hasn't just been labelled wrong has it?

 

[RimBlock]

My understanding is that you should not mix the standards in a ingle device to device run (comp to switch for example) but you can use a different standard from the switch to another computer.

As long as the single run from computer to wall socket to other wall socket to switch is all the same standard you should be fine.

Saying that, if you have all 'A' patch cables and 'B' wall runs then you should also be fine.

If your wiring is all 'A' from wall socket to wall socket then get a set of 'A' patch cables to test a link.

All my pre-bought cables were 'B' so I wired the wall sockets for 'B' and all work fine.

Grab a cheap network tested from ebay which will at least tell you if the cables are all terminated correctly. They are around 3 quid.

RB