Creating a home Ethernet out of installed but unused Cat 5

Jan 29, 2006 25 Replies

A long time ago I remember seeing sheilded cat 5. There is one big problem with sheilded. You can only ground 1 end not both. I've also seen cable that is sheilded and looks like cat 5. The problem with this stuff is the impedance of the cable is out of spec and will cause all sorts of problems.

If it runs from each jack to a central terminal you can replace the terminal with a switch. If it's daisy-chained you can't.

Quoting what your replying to is nice. It gives context to your question.

It is probably 3 pair screened CAT5, this is pretty common in newer residentlial installations (for telephone).

The last place you want to save a few bucks by buying mickey mouse stuff is on a network.

How do you define "Mickey Mouse" stuff? By price? Just because a vendor decides to sell at reasonable prices rather than take the full markup on the stuff doesn't mean it's any worse. By all means know what you're buying but don't equate price only to quality.

From:George snipped-for-privacy@nospam.invalid

Well it wasn't actually labeled 'cat5cableguy' on the product you know...

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