I have had factory made patch cables broken fresh from the packaging, so I 100% support making your own. The cable tester is nice to see the ordering too. Just this week I got proud for not having any faulty crimps and the next cable I did I switched the browns around :)
I wish someone with your sort of channel audience would tackle fiber optic terminations. Many network engineers are scared to attempt to DIY this yet it's become so simple with cold connection mechanical connectors that take only a minute to install and yield loss levels that are insignificant compared with fusion splicing. The whole toolkit is less than $100 AUD now, in fact less than $50 if one tackles it in a minimalist way. If you are unfamiliar with doing this, take us along on your journey of finding out how and discovering how simple it has become and if it's something you already know how to do then all the more reason for it to be a topic.
The outlets should have a clip over the wires so they don’t pop out. Well in fact with new installations with CAT6A the wires are heavily embedded into the mech and can’t come out. That cabling is of CAT5 standard where the wire can just fall out.
Always nice to go back to basics and still know how to fix even the most basic of physical faults. But thanks for the reminder that network monitoring is always good for this too.👍
The Southwire M550 network tester is a bit better and more compact. It doesn't show results on both sides of the cable, but it only takes a second to pass/fail the cable. Favorite cable tester right now.
Those testers aren't bad for a quick check but i have had that type of tester show all connections as good but still having a fault at one of the connectors still, obviously enough connection to bell out but no connectivity. Had to resort to replacing both end connections to resolve connection. They are great for a basic first quick check though.
Good troubleshooting vid. You probably already know this but its more ideal to punchdown with as little untwisted cable as possible and put the plastic retainer cap on the back of the mechs. I prefer to punchdown straight into the back instead of off to the side of the mech but each to their own. Keeps the outer insulation embedded all the way into the back of the mech and makes it a bit more mechanically secure.
Had the same issue with a data drop at the house, i thought builder had cheaped out and ran cat5, tested the keystone and sure enough one of the strands wasn't punched properly, replaced it and voila 1gb.
I'm sure your terminations would fail a test with a cable certifier. The pairs look to have been untwisted quite a lot. The magic in UTP is the twist ratios. Each of the 4 pairs has a different twist rate that is not a mulriple of the others. When you untwist the pair you allow noise to enter. Modern silicon seems to handle a bit of noise. Might struggle with 2.5G or 10G.
You don’t need anything fancy for punchdowns I literally use a pair of small scissors to punch 110 blocks in a pinch and until recently didn’t even own a proper krone tool, fancy tools make no difference if the person using them is a tool
Isn't it possible to get one gig from only 2 pairs ? Once at work we had a faulty utp cable, I think pin 3 and 4, and it was for an AP powered with PoE. It was the cable that was faulty not the patch nor the crimping. The guy who ran the cables through the walls never came to fixe that. So I went like "Hey let's suppose this is PoE mode A and try to use the unused pairs". So I did a different wiring on the AP side. Like you I didn't want to remove the patch panel to change the wiring on the patch side, so I juste made a custom patch cable that reroutes the good pins in place of the faulty ones : one side of the custom patch cable was pins 12345678 and the other was pins 12785634, since mode A PoE uses only pins 123 and 6 it worked. After two years our customer finally got a good wifi connection in the back of the building :) I'm not sur but I think the switch indicated that the connection was one gig, I have to check that.
