Um, no you don’t. If the cable is 90 feet too long, and I chop 85 feet off the original cable, then I have a whole bunch of cable on which to practice, but I have only 5 extra feet on the original cable. Get it wrong on the first try, and then I have maybe 4 1/2 extra feet, then 4, then 3 1/2, etc. etc.
Coil up the extra and forget about it. If you buy the tools, you’ll use them once and never have the occasion to use them again. Not too many folks have network cable runs in their houses.
You don’t chop off 85 ft at once. You chop off maybe 5 inches and you crimp / test the remaining length. Do it as many times in increments of a few inches as needed until you are confident that you can cut and make a good crimp, then commit.
And if you happen to miss on that one, then what?
I still say coil the excess into a loop and be done with it. Way easier, and no way to screw it up.
It’s something that requires a bit of practice, not the electric dark arts. Plus you still aren’t cutting it down to exact length required, you can leave and loop a bit of extra. a couple ft if extra length looped is a lot easier to manage than stuffing nearly 100 ft of coiled cable somewhere because you are afraid to cut it.
Yeah, it’s really not that difficult to get right. If you aren’t colorblind and have enough manual dexterity to, say, replace a screw on a pair of glasses, then you can crimp a network cable. I’ve done hundreds perfectly at this point. A little practice is needed but it’s not, as you say, some dark art.
As long as you don’t need those glasses to see what you are doing. I suggest you need good manual dexterity and good near vision.
Well, good manual dexterity, good near vision, and a bit of patience.
On the positive side, you will probably have enough cable left over to make a a few shorter cables if you ever need them, and jacks to repair any cables you might have that have been abused or damanged. It’s not a bad skill to have.
I have the extra loops of length in the room with the router and server and all that. On the other side of the loops, I started tacking the cable down with U shaped retainers. This room was the worst (tacking along the baseboard below the bottom shelf of a bookcase, diverting over a crawlspace door, behind a bulky dresser I had to pull out, up over a closet door and down the other side, etc). Now I have a short hallway (easy) and down the stairs (also easy, there’s a diagonal trim I can follow in a line instead of doing a stack of L-shaped maneuvers), then the living room (less easy, but not as bad as the room I started in.
Hah. 35+ years ago, in the era of coaxial cable for mainframe terminals, I was working at a tiny vendor. At one point we grew the office by cutting through a wall (yes, this was with the landlord’s knowledge!). But the only long cable we had was way long, and we didn’t have a crimper yet.
So whoever ran the cable (to a 3299, if you’re old enough to wonder why one cable) used that.
But at the jumping off point to the new space was a firewall. Well, that never stopped us, but he decided not to pull all the cable through the small hole he cut in that.
So forever after, there was a suspiciously bulging ceiling tile just outside the new space. Every so often someone new would see it and think, “I should fix that, it looks bad”. The minute they got a ladder, everyone would explain why you DID NOT want to molest that tile, because many pounds of cable would rain down if you did.
If you’re wondering about safety regulations, this is the same office where, later, we moved our toy data center down two floors to the basement. But we wanted the tape drives upstairs for easy access. No problem: we bored a couple of 4" holes through the concrete floors and ran the cables vertically! The holes were hidden in a locked closet, so any random inspector type wasn’t super likely to notice, and indeed did not.
And the building is still there. I drive by and think about stopping to see if the holes are still there.
But Ahunter3 is terrible at gift wrapping!
He turns out to be pretty good at tacking down cable. Preens
It’s done. Toted a laptop downstairs and plugged the ethernet cable in, to make sure I hadn’t done any Really Bad Things to the cable in the process of attaching it to the mopboards and walls. Nice!
My upstairs office AKA the server room, which owns the router, was, as expected, a total PITA. Cable comes out of the router and makes a beeline for the bookcase, spare footage coiled below it, then 7-8 feet of tacking cable down at toenail level below bottom shelf of bookcase. Then up over the top of a crawlspace door, behind which are boxes of cables cords connectors and ancient storage devices and whatnot. Then behind a dresser which is pushed back into a recessed space, so after pulling the furniture out, a |_| shaped space along the baseboards. The up over the top of a closet, down the other side around a right angle bend and finally out the door.
Got that far in one day. Did the rest today: out the hallway, down the stairs, through the living room, and into the den. You can see the cable if you walk over to where it’s laid and stare at it but it’s mostly out of sight.
Yaay for success!!
The idea of connecting anything data with wires just sounds so … quaint. And I date back to mainframes with cable bundles the diameter of your torso running under the raised floors.
I’m not meaning to disparage your decision; just pointing out how it sounds to me here in good gosh 2024!
I’m about to set up a new residence and IT / AV rig where the only cables are 120V or low voltage power after a wall wart.
The fundamental wide-area network that comprises the Internet has just entered the chat.
I’ve been IT since the late 80s. If it is plugged in for power, you might as well have data cabled too.
If there existed a WiFi standard that was anywhere close to as good as 1000BASE-T from 1999, I might be onboard with that comment, but we don’t. I’ve still never seen a wireless setup that could get more than a few hundred megabits/sec under absolutely optimal conditions, and if anything gets in the way of that, the result will be anywhere from crappy bandwidth down to multi-second glitches. Meanwhile, gigabit Ethernet over even shitty Cat 5 gets exactly 1000 Mb/s day or night. And against 10 Gb/s fiber? It is to laugh.
WiFi is still a toy, IMO. It sorta works often enough for undemanding applications. But for actual work you still need a wired connection.
I’ll chime in with the rest. Good wire is greater than great wifi and a lot cheaper.
I do AV for my church, and am pretty good buds with the AV guy from another church. Not to mention the people who installed our AV system in the first place. Different backgrounds, different levels of experience, but we all agree with @Dr.Strangelove. And even “shitty Cat 5” still works better and won’t break the budget.
I did use cables to connect and sync a bunch of audio devices with predictable, sub-millisecond latency versus wi-fi (albeit what was available was shitty wi-fi).
Yeah, this. I’m very happy that WiFi is a thing. But it’s slower.
The steady march of Wi-Fi and equivalent RF technologies has been almost inconceivable to watch.
But just like it’s hard to beat the bandwidth of a panel truck full of micro SD cards, long-haul fiber and good in-house 802.3 variants are very hard to beat.
Of course, you can’t backhoe an RF wave pattern. Or drag an anchor over it.
But for pure speed and volume, a conductor (of either electricity or photons) is where it is.
Even great WiFi is bad. I worked on a project that aimed to do real-time video streaming over WiFi with moderately low latency–say, around 10 ms. Dedicated router and receiver (consumer grade, admittedly), short range, relatively noise-free environment… still nowhere close to good enough, with frequent glitches >100 ms. The bandwidth wasn’t even that high. No problem at all over wired.
For a streaming service like Netflix, it’s no problem since you can just buffer several seconds and it’ll cover even long glitches. But that’s unacceptable for anything realtime.