Sunday, June 9, 2024 at 7:33 PM
We have a Cat5 (not Cat5e) cable which runs from one end of the house to the other. It goes from the electrical panel in the basement, up to the second floor, through the attic, the whole length of the house, down the wall, across the floor behind the molding and to an outlet behind a desk in my dad's bedroom. Then another cable plugs into that outlet and goes to my computer room on the other side of the wall. We have already replaced a faulty section of that cable with spare Cat5 we had. When I test the whole cable with my cable tester, the 6th wire is intermittent. Sometimes it works and sometimes it does not. So I made a pair of adapters (pictured below) that plug the orange and green pairs of the female plug to the blue and brown pairs of the male plug. When I test the cable with my cable tester, wires 1, 2, 3 and 6 light up. Good. But when I plug it into a switch, the link light keeps going on and off. When I plugged it into my iMac, the connection kept coming and going. After many tests with various switches and routers, I am beginning to suspect the quality of the cable. We plan to replace it with new Cat6 cable. I am sick of trying to make this old cable work. Pictured below is the adapter in my room.